Читать книгу Baby Trouble: The Spy's Secret Family - Cindy Dees - Страница 17

What little breath Laura had left after the mood swings of the past two hours whooshed out of her. She felt like a washcloth that had been twisted and squeezed until every last drop of life had been wrung out of her. She was empty. Emotionally done in. Logic told her this was an extreme situation and not to make any major life decisions in the midst of the crisis. But the urge to sweep aside everything and everyone who stood between her and Adam was irresistible.

Nick began to read aloud. She exhaled carefully as he went through a ridiculously huge list of assets. Nikolas Spiros hadn’t been merely rich. He’d been wealthy beyond imagining. And she had a pretty big imagination.

“Listen to this,” he exclaimed. “If I die of unnatural causes, she gets nothing.”

“As in zero?”

“That’s correct. Not a dime. And in fact, she’s required to return any jewelry, clothing, cars, homes, or cash assets accrued during the marriage to my estate.”

“Wow. Trust her much, did you?”

“Apparently not.”

“Sounds like you thought she was a potential black widow even before you married her,” Laura responded.

Nick was frowning, too. “It does beg the question, why did I marry her in the first place if I thought it was a good possibility that she’d try to kill me for my money?”

“Were you always that mistrustful of the women you dated?”

“It was an issue wondering if women wanted me for myself or for my wealth. But at some point, you have to take a chance and go with your gut. I may have gotten it wrong with Meredith, but I got it right with you … twice.”

She brushed aside the overture. Adam was her entire focus at this juncture. But the mystery of Nick’s marriage to a woman he clearly thought dangerous tantalized her. Was Meredith behind either or both kidnappings after all?

The man she knew—both in Paris and now—simply wouldn’t have married a woman in whom he had so little faith. Surely Nick’s core personality hadn’t changed that much in the past six years. “Do you have any idea how you met Meredith?” she asked.

“No, I don’t.”

She asked cautiously, “Would you mind if I researched your wife a little?”

His gaze was open and honest, and he answered without hesitation. “Be my guest.”

Thank God. He was finally willing, not only to face his past, but to let her see it, too. She minimized the AbaCo files and pulled up her favorite search engine. She typed rapidly.

In seconds, pictures of Nick and Meredith from the front pages of the tabloids leaped onto her screen. “Attractive woman,” Laura commented.

Nick shrugged. “Beauty comes from inside a person. You’re attractive. From what I know of her, she has the heart of a snake. She may be well-groomed, but she is not attractive to me.”

Laura might have smiled under other circumstances. But as it was, she kept typing grimly. “She was living pretty high on the hog when you met—designer clothes, expensive hotels and spas, jewelry running into hundreds of thousands of dollars …” She typed some more. “Did you know she was collecting art? It looks like she’d bought a couple million dollars’ worth by the time you two hooked up.”

Nick looked about as interested as if she’d told him the price of tea in China had gone up by a penny a pound.

Laura poked around some more, but then leaned back, perplexed. “I can’t find the source of her money. She doesn’t come from a wealthy background, and I’m not finding any indication she had a high-paying job. She had a high school education from an average school. No college. She wasn’t a model. Several years prior to meeting you, she started tossing around the big bucks. She didn’t appear to be dating any men who could’ve financed that sort of lifestyle. According to her tabloid appearances, she seemed to be picking up mostly good-looking toy boys and footing the bill for them.”

Nick made a face. “Maybe she was a hooker.”

Laura snorted. “Even high-end working girls don’t pull down the kind of money she was spending. She was blowing through three to five million dollars a year.”

“Was she running up a massive debt? Maybe she married me to dig herself out?”

Laura gestured with her chin toward his laptop. “Is there any record of your attorney running a background check on her? My lawyer used to run one on all the guys I dated in college, and I didn’t inherit anywhere near the wealth you had.”

Nick scowled. “I seem to recall William checking out my girlfriends at university, and it drove me crazy.”

“Did you tell him to stop?”

He laughed. “I doubt William would have listened to me. He was the executor of my father’s estate and had the power to do pretty much whatever he pleased. As I recall, he didn’t think I was exactly the most responsible young man on the planet.”

“Was he right?”

“Absolutely. I was in my early twenties, good-looking, smart, and too rich for my own good. Girls flocked to me, and I had no problem taking advantage of that. William kept me on a stupidly tight financial leash. Good thing he did, too. I might have blown my inheritance before I grew up and got interested in the shipping business.”

“What else could Meredith have been up to that pulled in so much cash?” Laura asked thoughtfully.