All That Glitters. Mary Brady

thought. Attack her and keep her on edge. Maybe he didn’t want to play nice after all.

      “All right.” She moved around so she could see his face. “You don’t hate me, but you know why I’m here. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

      His shoulders stiffened and he drew in a breath. “You have all your facts and you’re looking for that personal touch to make your story more sensational.” Again his words were not angry.

      Under his assessing gaze, she suddenly felt as if he knew exactly who and what she was. As if he had been there that day when her source in Afghanistan had been exposed as a liar.

      She felt the humiliation try to submerge her again, as if he was qualified to judge her.

      She gathered her wits. “You did what you did and I came here to try to make some sense of it. To try to understand.”

      In Afghanistan she had been stupid and too eager. She had almost caused others to lose their lives, and that might make her as morally corrupt as he was.

      Disgust and repugnance aimed at herself suddenly seemed much worse than it had ever been. It made her sick to her stomach, made her head flood with the images floating around on the internet that portrayed her to be the lowest kind of life-form.

      She looked up and he was standing almost toe-to-toe with her.

      “What do you think you will be trying to understand?”

      His question brought her back into reality, the loft, the hurricane, the many people this man had cheated. His words had been soft as if trying to assess her again, not to challenge her.

      “How—how things started. I thought you might tell me how things started.”

      He stepped away but watched her warily.

      With both palms pressed to the counter she continued. “Did it start out as a swindle?”

      She expected him to smile at this, to pull out his charm to deflect her. Perhaps put on enough of a show to make her believe he had been wronged, to make her go sit in the four-poster room and use what she already had about him, type up a tidy article that looked just like everyone else’s.

      Not to dig around inside his head for deeper motives. Maybe his mother withheld love. Maybe his father exiled him to the military academy he attended for four years and supposedly hated.

      He didn’t smile at all. He looked tired. He had a right to be exhausted. She’d give him that. He had been out saving boats and rescuing women who wanted to tear his life apart. And that was exactly what she wanted to do, to tear his life apart as he had torn apart her sister’s.

      She wanted to disassemble him.

      Limb by limb, she thought and then asked, “At what point did you realize things were spinning out of control? That you were going to have to distance yourself from the fray so as to look innocent?”

CHAPTER FOUR

      AS IF ADDY hadn’t spoken, Hale walked away and brought one bowl of soup from the microwave and placed it on a plate she had set on the table. Then he returned to the microwave for the other. She was sure he was going to put the second bowl back in the refrigerator or even pour it down the drain or, better, over her head.

      He did none of the above.

      He placed the second bowl on the other plate and looked over at her with a look that said, “Sit.”

      She scrambled to do so—for the story, of course, and because she was really, truly, so very desperately hungry.

      He sat after she did. Either there were old-school manners in this man, or perhaps, this was her last supper and he wanted to be in a position to run her down if she tried to escape. At least she wouldn’t die hungry, she thought as she instinctively slid back on the heavy wood-and-leather chair.

      Hands in her lap, ’cause she had some manners, too, she sat and waited for his lead. “Behave like them and they may treat you as one of them” had been the advice of one of her instructors in college and—sometimes the magic worked. It had when she donned the clothing and the persona of an Afghani peasant woman—or it had worked for a while.

      He put his napkin on his lap. She did the same.

      After he took his first taste of the soup, she sipped a bit of hers. It was delicious and soon she had to slow herself down, so she floated a few small oyster crackers on top of her soup. As she savored the next mouthful it occurred to her that she was concentrating too much on the food, the conversation being nonexistent.

      She snapped her gaze to Hale’s face.

      He seemed to be ignoring her or if she left her ego out, he was thinking about something that troubled him. So should he be. He should be thinking about all the people’s lives that he’d ruined, all the heartache he’d caused, all the money he had gained and was going to lose.

      Then why did he look so damned mouth-watering? She swiped her lips with her napkin. His sun-highlighted hair, thick, short on the sides and not too long on the top, almost always perfectly styled and trimmed often. Today it had been finger-combed, in an endearingly youthful way. He looked vulnerable without his facade.

      If he wasn’t so morally corrupt and she wasn’t so desperate to get at the truth, he might even look...enticing.

      She yanked her brain away from that vein of perilous thinking and scrambled for a question to ask.

      She needed something affable. Be his friend. Be someone he wanted to talk to, a houseguest with whom he’d at least speak politely. If swindlers spoke politely when they didn’t have to speak at all.

      “The home.” She nodded in the direction where the big old house sat connected to the garage via the breezeway. “The antiques in the home are lovely. Tell me about some of the history over there. If you wouldn’t mind.” She added the last part with a warm smile.

      The narrow-eyed look he gave her said he knew exactly what she was doing and why, but he cleared his throat and after a moment of silence said, “The home was built in the early 1800s by the man who originally established the town.”

      “The Bailey of Bailey’s Cove.”

      “Liam Bailey. He built the house for the woman he loved.” Hale’s words sounded as if he read them from a brochure, but at least he wasn’t declining to speak with her.

      “How many generations ago did this ancestor of yours live?”

      “The builder lived in the early 1800s, about eight generations back, but he isn’t my ancestor.”

      She tipped her head and raised an eyebrow. “You live in his ancestral home and are the keeper of the family history. What do his descendents say?”

      “No one knew until recently that he had descendents.”

      “Missing descendents sounds interesting.” Juicy, better than gold in most people’s lives. She almost added, “Tell me about it,” but one could only use that phrase twice at best before an interviewee started feeling strip-mined.

      He didn’t reply and Addy feared she might have worn out her welcome already.

      The wind blew outside and a branch or something clattered against the roof. The raging storm had kept every other journalist away from this story and she had no intention of blowing it now.

      She started to speak, but so did he.

      “Go on. I’d love to hear all about it,” she said first and then she sat up straight and rested her spoon on the plate beside her soup bowl.

      “In the early 1800s Patrick McClure came to the newly formed United States to avoid the English taxes. Immigration didn’t help his wife, Fanny McClure, as she died in childbirth, leaving McClure with two children under a year old and the need for a new wife. My direct ascendant was Fanny’s firstborn son.”