Читать книгу Taken - Tori Carrington, Tori Carrington - Страница 9

4

WHEN RYDER had emerged from his shower to find Carol gone, he’d been amused. He’d hoped the sound of the water would wake her and entice her to slip under the multi-jet spray with him.

Instead she’d left.

When she hadn’t shown up to work by ten, he suspected she’d gone back to her place and fallen asleep. He thought maybe she’d be in later.

Then around eleven, John Coleman had requested an emergency meeting.

By 4:00 p.m. Ryder was furiously aware of everything one Carol Lambert had done. Only it hadn’t been Carol Lambert but the sexy woman he’d slept with last night. Because Carol Lambert was a thirty-eight-year-old brunette who still lived in Washington State and hadn’t transferred to New York and his company, but rather was taking extended time off to have her first child.

“How much are we looking at?” he asked Coleman.

“Three quarters of a mil.”

Ryder sat back in his chair as if hit in the chest with a punching bag.

“This woman was good. She brokered a deal between Blackwell and a sham company that as of this morning no longer exists.”

“Get the money back.”

“Easier said than done. The instant the money hit the sham company’s account it was then automatically transferred out to various other accounts, and I’m guessing even more accounts from there. The minute the money left our bank it essentially became untraceable.” Coleman shook his head as he considered the printouts he held. “This woman was a pro. She knew exactly what she was doing.” He looked up. “Johnstone says this was a set-up from the get go. She borrowed the Lambert woman’s résumé, burrowed deep into the company, then meticulously set us up.”

Ryder rubbed his face, as much to wake himself up from the nightmare he was in the middle of as to rid himself of the erotic images that kept sliding through his mind from last night.

Coleman didn’t know he’d spent the night sleeping with the enemy. Sleeping—hah! They hadn’t slept at all. He’d had Carol, the con artist, every which way it was possible to have a woman. Hell, he’d had more sex with her in one night than he’d had in the entire year.

And he’d been stupid enough to believe he’d be getting more of it.

And still wanted it despite what she’d done.

“Johnstone’s got nearly every detective firm in Manhattan working the case now.”

“So he’s confident she’ll be caught.”

Coleman grimaced. “Look, Ry, I’ve never been one to mislead you. The truth is, given the professional nature of the crime, with every moment that passes the trail gets colder.”

“You mean there’s a chance we won’t catch up with her?”

“More than a chance. A probability.”

Coleman’s cell phone rang, and he answered. A minute later, he rang off.

“The apartment she rented came furnished and was in Carol Lambert’s name. And it was wiped clean. Not a print anywhere. But they think they got a couple of hair samples.”

“Security cameras?”

“The staff is going over Blackwell’s videos now. But routine dictates that they erase tapes after a twenty-four-hour period so all we’ll have is the footage from yesterday.”

Ryder looked at his watch. The woman had left his place just before six. Nine hours ago. Which meant she could be pretty much anywhere in the world by now. Probably collecting the cash she’d stolen from his company.

“I want to see the footage as soon as it comes in.”

“I don’t expect to get much,” Coleman said. “She always walked as if staring at something on her shoe. I thought it was because she was self-conscious, but now we know the real reason.”

Ryder also knew the real reason she’d originally rebuffed his advances yesterday after finding out he’d been the one she’d raced with. No doubt number one in the con artist’s handbook was “Fly under the radar.”

“Ryder?”

He blinked at Coleman.

“Are you okay?”

No. He was far from okay. Because he was all too aware that if he hadn’t taken the woman back to his place last night, he wouldn’t be obsessed with the situation right now. He’d have left everything in Coleman’s capable hands and gone on with his day full of meetings overseeing expansion plans, financial realignments and mergers. While the amount of money wasn’t anything to sneeze at by any means, it wasn’t enough to warrant the type of attention he was giving to it. The company lost that amount in a day if truck drivers went on strike in the Midwest.

Despite all that, he’d cancelled everything, mentally incapable of doing anything but concentrating on this one thing. This was personal.

“I want to talk to Johnstone,” he said, naming the head of security.

“I can do that. Don’t you have a meeting regarding Stanton?”

Ryder got up from his chair and put his suit jacket on. “I cancelled it.”

“But we’re in the final stages of closing the deal. Everything’s set to go into motion the instant the takeover papers are signed. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

No, it was a decidedly bad idea. The not-altogether-friendly leveraged buyout of his second-largest competitor would give him a marketing edge in the nation’s distribution system, one of the many areas in which Blackwell & Blackwell owned businesses. But Ryder couldn’t help himself. He was going to find this woman who’d impersonated Carol Lambert, the woman in the rented Audi, and he was going to find her now.

BY THE END of the week, Ryder had been forced to accept that his finding her wasn’t going to be easily checked off his agenda.

It was a Sunday and along with Blackwell & Blackwell’s own security team, he was paying three detective firms double their going rate to find her.

Only it was beginning to look like no amount of money was going to be able to uncover the true identity of the woman who’d screwed him… twice.

Coleman told him that perhaps it was time to admit defeat and move on. Besides, the company could write the loss off. There was the Stanton deal in limbo and very possibly in danger of unraveling altogether. But Ryder couldn’t seem to think of anything else.

“Are you all right, son?”

Ryder looked at his father, walking next to him along the Coney Island boardwalk. The place where he’d grown up, but now only visited when he saw his father every other Sunday.

“That’s the third time you’ve asked me,” Ryder said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his Lauren khakis.

Growing up, he’d heard countless times how much he and his father looked alike. Some of the family’s relatives had even taken to calling him Junior, though his father’s name was Alan. But time had erased those physical similarities. And while Ryder only lived across the river in Manhattan, it might as well have been across the Atlantic as far as their lifestyles went. His father would take the train into town every now and again for coffee and to go to a museum exhibit or an off-off-Broadway show, but otherwise their lives were separate. And had been since Ryder’s mother had died of breast cancer fifteen years ago.

Of course, it didn’t help that their differences extended to their own personal ideologies.

Being born a Blackwell, his father had once told him, was no different than being born under any other name, despite the historical and cultural significance it once held in New York. Ryder would always remember that conversation, held when he’d come home soaked on a rainy Tuesday in April. He was nine and he’d just learned that his ancestors had been instrumental in the building of Manhattan and that even his grandfather, his father’s father, had enjoyed great wealth, until the mid 1950s when the family had been bankrupted.

His father? His take was that it had probably happened for a good reason. While Alan Blackwell had been educated at Harvard and enjoyed a privileged upbringing, he’d adjusted amazingly well to his new station in life. In fact, it seemed to suit him better, his mother used to say. Rather than working as the CEO of the family company and attending Broadway openings and Lincoln Center charity events, he’d taught American Lit at NYU for most of his career, and had just recently retired, speaking here and there when invited.

Otherwise he lived a quiet life in Brooklyn, visiting his favorite bakery every morning, reading the newspaper, or with his nose in whatever obscure book he’d picked up from the used bookstore on the corner.

But whereas his father had experienced life on both sides of the fence, young Ryder had spent his youth with his fingers fused to the fence links, staring longingly at the skyline across the river. Driven not only to recover his family’s longstanding wealth and status, but to up the ante on both counts.

And at thirty-six he’d done all that and more.

“And that’s the third time you haven’t answered me.” His father chuckled quietly then put his arm around his son’s shoulders. “Ask the experienced, not the learned.”

Ryder offered a half grin. His life had been filled with quotes from one source or another. Mostly his father had been trying to convince him that it wasn’t how much he had in his pockets but the love he held in his heart that was the true measure of a good man.

Ryder had in turn spent most of his life ignoring that advice.

“Just some things going on at work,” he said.

“Anything you’d like to share?”

“No, no.”

“And here I thought the problem might be a woman.” The senior Blackwell drew to a stop near the edge of the boardwalk and squinted out at the sparkling Atlantic. “You know, one of your mother’s biggest regrets was that she never got to enjoy a grandchild.”

“If I remember correctly, you were the one to say that I probably would never have children.”

“That’s because you have to find a good woman first. And you move too fast to catch bad women, much less good ones.” He looked at him. “Up until recently I at least hoped you’d make an effort at continuing the Blackwell name if just for legacy’s sake.”

“I thought you didn’t buy into any of that.”

“I don’t. But you do. Me? I’d just like to have a grandson or granddaughter who I can teach to play chess. Or at least know that my son, my only child, will finally learn what it means to know love.”

“I know love. I had it with Mom. With you.”

“And when I’m gone?”

Ryder also stared out at the ocean. “Are you planning on a trip I don’t know about?”

“No. But it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately.”

“I told you it was a bad idea when you retired—”

“I was forced out, Ryder. There’s nothing more irritating than a rambling old man who can’t find his notes.”

“So teach somewhere here. At a Brooklyn school.”

“My teaching days are over.” They began walking again. “Besides, if I couldn’t teach my own son, tell me what impact I’d really have on other’s children.”

It wasn’t like his father to talk about death in such a direct way. And Ryder wasn’t sure how to take it. While he’d heard other parents talk to their children about the impending visit from the Grim Reaper, even if that visit was some twenty to thirty years in the future, his father had never been like that. There were too many topics to discuss, politics to cut through.

“A wiser man, perhaps, might have figured out early on that the way to teach you was to misteach you.”

“How do you mean?”

“If I had encouraged you, no insisted on, you rebuilding the family fortune, you would have rebelled and done the opposite. Had I told you having a wife and children would only saddle you down, you probably would be married fifteen years now with three kids.”

Ryder chuckled. “Reverse psychology. But you’re leaving out that I would have seen through such a ruse. Besides, you could never have done it. It goes against everything you are. Everything you taught me to be.”

“But you’re still not married.”

“Why don’t you travel, Pops? You and mom always talked about wanting to travel.”

In fact, he’d arranged a month-long tour of England, Scotland and Ireland while his mother was still well enough to travel.

“I’m too old for the hassle. Besides, that was your mom’s and my dream. Without her…well, without her it wouldn’t be the same.”

And one day, perhaps soon, Ryder would be faced with life without his father in it. And for the first time he accepted that it wouldn’t be the same, either.