CONFESSIONAL 401
Judson, Dean: (CEO, Juniper Ridge)
When you’ve got a sister who’s a shrink, you learn a lot of self-help jargon. Stuff like ‘growth opportunity’ and ‘problem solving.’ I’ve tried like hell to treat every fuckup like a chance to do better. To be better. I like to think I’ve done that. That I’ve managed to learn from where I’ve screwed up so I don’t do it again.
It's possible I learned the wrong lessons.
I should go after her. That’s what a good boyfriend would do, a good business leader.
But I’m neither of those things, so I watch her walk away. As my eyes trail Vanessa’s lovely, familiar form in a dress the color of champagne, I hate myself with every step she takes.
I don’t know how long I stand there before I hear Cooper’s voice.
“You okay?”
I turn to see he’s slipped back into his office. Lieutenant Lovelin is nowhere to be seen, and I’m glad about that.
I take a step through Coop’s doorway and shove my hands in my pockets. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
He kicks the door closed behind us and leans against the wall. “You don’t look so good.”
I ignore the jab and look down at his desk. It’s covered in a mess of papers and cables, and inexplicably, a pile of Legos. “How much of that conversation did you hear?”
“Enough,” he says. “You were pretty loud.”
Such a Cooper answer. I meet his eyes, my baby brother who’s a half inch taller than me. I hate that.
But not as much as I hate the feeling in my gut right now. “You caught the stuff about cheating?”
Cooper nods. “The CPA exam, huh? Seems like the kind of thing you’d catch in a background check.”
“I don’t understand.” I drag my hands through my hair, trying to figure out where I went wrong. “Mari handled the checks, and I even did a second one to be safe. Got a copy of her CPA license. Called her references. Had the PI do some digging. Nothing ever came up.”
My brother studies me for several long seconds. “May I see it?”
“The email?” I slip out my phone and cue it up to the email, then pass it over without a word.
Coop’s eyes sweep over the screen, his brow furrowing as he takes it in. I can picture the words in my head, and my gut sinks all over again like it did the instant I saw it in my inbox.
I’d kissed her goodnight, long, and slow, and sweet. And then, because we’re both Type-A workaholics, both of us spent a couple minutes on our phones, setting alarms and scoring one last hit of data. All the usual bullshit.
There it was, an email sent from oopsiedaisy541@juniperridge.com. A fake account, but a very real message. I read the words with Vanessa’s thigh against mine, her head on my chest.
Cheating.
On the CPA exam.
I could have said something then. She was still awake, her breath gently fanning my chest. I wondered if she could hear my heart pounding, sense my visceral reaction to that word.
Cheating.
“Wait.” Cooper frowns at me. “You don’t think she actually did this, right?”
I stare at him. To be honest, I never asked myself this question. That sounds stupid now, but my first thought was about protection. Protecting Vanessa from embarrassment. Protecting our show from scandal. Protecting all of us from the hot, flaming mess that I know these things become.
My thoughts are whirling and none of them are coming out of my mouth, so Cooper tries again. “It says there was an investigation,” he says with a lot more gentleness than I probably deserve. “What were the findings?”
“I don’t know.” I realize I’m grinding my teeth and order myself to stop. “I haven’t called the AICPA yet. I wanted to meet with Lana first. See if we need to get lawyers involved before we go that route.”
Cooper shakes his head slowly but doesn’t say anything.
“What?”
“Let me ask you again,” he says slowly. “You think she did this?”
I think about Vanessa. How kind and good and brave she is. How she rescued a scared dog and handled that banker’s meltdown with grace and compassion. How she loves her sister and endures her mother and, above all, remains the most caring person I’ve ever met.
“No,” I say slowly. “No. I guess not.”
“You guess not?” Cooper shakes his head slowly. “There’s a fucking vote of confidence.”
I throw up my hands. “What do you want me to say? It’s irrelevant what I think. The important thing is to protect her from bullshit like this.”
“That is not the important thing.” Cooper sinks into the cushy leather chair in the corner and shakes his head. “Jesus, Dean.”
“What?” I know I sound dumb, but I honestly don’t get it. “How many times have we seen shit like this pop up? Someone blackmailing you over a DUI or going public with my text breakup or saying they’ve hacked Lauren’s phone for nude photos?”
I’m still furious over that last one. Over all of it, really. Celebrities are prime targets for threats like this, and if there’s one thing that makes me rage, it’s assholes terrorizing the people I love.
And I do love Vanessa. More than anything, I wish I’d told her that. Maybe it would make a difference.
Or maybe not, based on how Cooper’s glaring at me. “Can you take just a second to pull your head out of your ass and think about how this looks from Vanessa’s perspective?”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs and tips back in his chair. “You get this anonymous email. This message saying she did some horrible thing that’s obviously going to push all your buttons. Cheating, for Christ’s sake, right?”
“Right,” I say slowly, still not grasping what he’s driving at.
Cooper softens his tone. “Anyone who knows you has a damn good idea that cheating is a deal breaker for you. That’s the best way to rile you, to leave you questioning the woman you love.”
I nod slowly, unsurprised Cooper guessed how I feel before I figured it out myself. “She didn’t do it.” The fierceness in my words takes me by surprise. “Of course she didn’t cheat.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” He grabs up a Rubik’s cube off his shelf, twisting it to mix up the colors. “Did you tell her that? Did you say ‘Vanessa, I trust you, I don’t believe this bullshit, let’s solve this together?’”
“No.” Though now that he’s saying it, I can see how that might have been a smart approach. “I wanted to shield her from shit like this. I honestly didn’t think about the allegation at all. It seemed smarter to gather our resources. Talk to lawyers, get Lana ready to fight this. Nip the whole thing in the bud before it has a chance to hurt her.”
Cooper shakes his head a little sadly, twisting the rows of Rubik’s cube colors without looking. “You’re thinking like a jaded Hollywood asshole.” He gives a wry grin. “I know that since I am one. But that’s not how Vanessa thinks.”
I sink down into his desk chair. It bounces a little beneath me, and the arms are weirdly out of whack with one adjusted higher than the other. Leave it to Cooper to have the world’s most uneven desk chair in an office filled with brand new furniture. “So now you’re the expert on how Vanessa thinks?”
“No, asshole.” He twists the Rubik’s cube again, aligning a neat row of blue squares. “But I am an expert on being judged without all the facts. On what it feels like to be presumed guilty every fucking time.”
I stare at him, letting my brother’s words sink in.
My God.
Is that what I’ve done? Is that how I made Vanessa feel? There’s a sinking in my gut that tells me I’ve screwed this up way worse than I realized.
“I just wanted to fix things,” I offer feebly.
“Maybe she didn’t want you to fix anything,” he says. “Ever consider that?”
“Yeah,” I mutter. “When she was yelling those exact words at me, it did cross my mind.”
He offers a good-natured half-smile. “She wants your respect, Dean. Not your forgiveness. Not your fix-it skills. Respect.”
The words zap me in the chest like lightning bolts. “I respect the hell out of her,” I insist. “She’s smart and creative and brilliant with numbers. I have mad respect for all of that.”
He cocks an eyebrow, still twisting the cube. He’s got all the greens aligned now, and I’m wondering how the fuck he’s doing this. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
I sigh, frustrated and stuck and angry all at once. All of that’s aimed at me, not my brother. Definitely not Vanessa. “How did I screw this up so badly? I only wanted to help.”
Cooper’s eyes fill with sympathy as he twists another row of colors. “I love you, man. You know I do.”
“But?”
He grins, kindly not making a butt joke. “Want to know what your problem is?”
“I’m supposed to say yes, right? That’s what Mari would tell me—I’m supposed to want to learn from my mistakes.”
“Mari’s not here. Sorry, but you’re stuck with the fuckup sibling instead of the shrink.”
I start to insist he’s not a fuckup, but Cooper waves me aside. “Look, man. You’re too damn good at everything. That’s your problem.”
I frown. “How is that a problem?” It sounds more like he’s trying to make me feel better, but that’s not Coop’s style.
“It’s a problem when you get too used to it,” he says. “You were the first to ride a bike. The first one to read or drive a car or get laid.”
“I’m not sure about that last one,” I muse, pretty sure that’s not his point.
“My point,” Cooper continues, ignoring me, “is that you got used to being the smartest and best and assuming that meant you needed to pave the way for everyone else. Trample the grass, chew down the branches, whatever the fuck lions do in the jungle so the other lions can pass through easier.”
“This is the weirdest metaphor ever.”
He shrugs and turns the cube to the side, glancing down to check his progress. He’s almost got the damn thing solved. “Look, I’m not here to tell you how to run a business. Or your relationship. Those are literally the last two areas where I’m qualified to give advice.”
“Isn’t it supposed to mean more if I figure it out for myself?”
He cocks his head. “Sure, go for it. What’s your best guess on where you went wrong and what you should have done differently?”
I think about that a moment. My instinct is to handle it the same way I always do. Send Vanessa on a spa day and call a lawyer to fix whatever mess she might be in. Hire cops and PIs to nail the son of a bitch who’s screwing with our program.
But I’m realizing it’s not the right answer.
“Listen,” I mutter.
“What?” He looks up from the Rubik’s cube. “There’s something you want to say?”
“No, I mean listen.” It’s not a command, it’s the answer, though the fact that Coop heard it the other way should tell me something. “That’s what I’m supposed to do is shut the fuck up and listen.”
Cooper drops the Rubik’s cube in his lap and points at me. “Bingo.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean it. You’re smart as hell, and everyone knows it. But so are plenty of other people. You’ve gotta give ‘em a chance to do their thing.”
I grit my teeth, hating that he’s right, but knowing he is. “Which means not rushing in to save the day all the time.”
“Sure, let other people wear the cape sometimes.” He grins. “They might surprise you and look better in it than you do.”
I think about Vanessa in that champagne-colored dress. Or wearing nothing at all, naked and beautiful in her bedroom. It’s the last thing I should be thinking about right now. I should be reminding myself she’s smart and capable and kind and clever. Obviously, there was some sort of mix-up with the CPA exam, but—
“I need to ask her about it.”
Cooper picks up the Rubik’s cube again. “You mean Vanessa? The exam thing?”
“Yeah.” I rake a hand through my hair. “That was a dick move to just assume.” Even if my assumption is that she wouldn’t do it, assuming anything at all wasn’t the right call.
“If it helps, I can tell you that admitting you’re a dick helps cancel out the dick move,” he says. “It’s in the manual or something.”
I laugh for the first time all morning. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” He watches me stand up. “You gonna go talk to her?”
“If she’ll see me.” After the way I acted, I wouldn’t blame her for not wanting to. “Maybe I’ll bring a peace offering. Flowers or something.”
He shakes his head sadly. “Flowers won’t cut it. Try muffins. Caffeine, maybe.”
“Since when are you the expert on women?”
He laughs and plucks the cube from his lap, twisting the last row to line the colors up in perfect formation. “It’s possibly my only area of expertise.”
“That’s not true.”
Still grinning, he chucks the cube at me. It bounces off my chest and lands with a clatter on Coop’s desk. “Go get your girl, dumbass.”
“And now you’re the bossy brother. Great.”
I turn and stalk out of his office, the echo of Coop’s laughter ringing in my ears.
He’s got a point, so I make a beeline for the coffee shop. My instincts are screaming at me to go to Amy Lovelin or call the bodyguard or email the AICPA so I can vindicate Vanessa once and for all.
But none of those are the right move.
Nothing matters but telling Vanessa how sorry I am. Not just a generic apology, either. Coop did a fine job pulling my head out of my ass. Now I need to show her, to make it clear I understand where I went wrong.
As I approach the coffee shop, I spot Colleen and Patti through the window. They’re hunched over a laptop, pointing at something on the screen. As I push through the door, they both look up.
“Hey, Dean.” Colleen frowns. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” That’s a lie. “Actually, no. I was a dumbass with Vanessa. Got anything I can take her as a peace offering?”
Patti perks up. “We’ve got Nutella banana oat muffins.”
“That’s a start.” That and a side of groveling might get me somewhere, though maybe I’ve done irreparable damage. I keep picturing that flash of hurt in her eyes when I told her about the email. “Can I have half a dozen? And a vanilla latte for Vanessa.”
Colleen picks up a cardboard mug. “We’ve got this new house made lavender syrup. Made it myself from the lavender patch over on the north edge of the property. She might like that better, since it fits with her goal of breaking out of old ruts.”
Old ruts like dating control-freak assholes?
“Make it a huge one,” I tell her. “Thanks.”
I sink down into the nearest chair, remembering Cooper’s words. Have I been so stuck inside my own ruts that I’ve ignored everyone else’s needs? If that’s true, odds are good Vanessa isn’t the only one I’ve hurt.
But she’s the one who matters most, especially right now. I don’t mean our professional relationship, either. It’s Vanessa the person I care about, not Vanessa the CFO. Not what she does for my business, but how she makes me feel. Not just me, but everyone she meets. Lana and Lauren, Tia and Mari, they all glow in the light she puts out. I can’t believe I didn’t consider that I might be snuffing it out.
I’m still digesting that when Patti yelps. “There! I just saw it again.”
I look up to see her watching the laptop screen, both her muffin-filled hands frozen over a pink cardboard box. As she gestures at the screen with one of them, Colleen abandons her post at the espresso machine.
“You’re sure?” She joins her wife behind the computer. “It’s not just a deer or something?”
“You know any deer who wear blue jeans?” Patti sets the muffins in the box and fiddles with the keyboard. “There must be some way to scroll back through the live video feed.”
“Want me to try?” Colleen asks.
“Yeah, you’ve used this system more than I have.”
I ease out of my chair, conscious of the nervous energy pulsing off both of them. “Everything okay?”
Patti looks up. “It’s one of the wildlife cams. The one on the north edge by Tia Nelson’s property.”
“One of your foxes?” Not that foxes wear blue jeans, either.
“Definitely not a fox.” Colleen taps a few keys on the laptop, and the reflection of the screen flashes in her eyes. “We thought maybe you had maintenance crews out there or something, but Lauren said no. Said there’s not supposed to be anyone out there right now.”
A ripple of unease moves through me. These two know way more than I do about computers and weird sightings in the area, so I hesitate to ask. “Mind if I look, too?”
“Be my guest.” Colleen taps a few more keys. “Hang on, I’ve almost got it queued up.”
All three of us watch as the camera scrolls back, then pauses on a flash of denim. “There.” Patti points at the screen. “See? Lower left-hand corner.”
Colleen frowns. “It’s like they know where the camera is, and they’re trying to stay out of the frame.”
“Didn’t quite make it,” Patti murmurs as Colleen hits a key to zoom in on the edge of the image. “Is that a hand?”
I peer closer, barely making out the grainy image. “Looks like a hand. Not a male one, either.”
Colleen grunts. “Men can wear pink nail polish, too.”
I let that pass, intent on studying the screen. I don’t recognize this particular patch of earth, which isn’t surprising. The compound is more than 50,000 acres, and I haven’t memorized them all. But there’s something else niggling at me.
“This borders Tia Nelson’s property?” I ask. “How far from there to the residences?”
“A quarter mile, maybe less.” Colleen zooms in closer. “It’s right up against that gravel road that runs the far edge of her property. It’s a real easy spot to slip through if you don’t want to be seen.”
I lean closer as the hair on my arms starts to prickle. I don’t know why, but something’s sitting weird with me. Something besides the idea of a stranger sneaking onto our property. Why not use the normal driveway?
“Can you get closer to that hand?” I ask. “Yes, there. Perfect.”
I squint at the blurry image and the edge of someone’s pantleg. The heel of a hiking boot that looks new, pink piping around the bottom. And that hand, it’s familiar. Not the painted nails, but something else.
“Oh, shit.” I blink a few times to make sure I’m not seeing things, but no. That bracelet. I’d recognize it anywhere.
I stand up straight, feeling dizzy.
“Dean?” Patti frowns. “You okay, honey?”
I nod, backing away from the screen. “Call Lieutenant Lovelin,” I say then stop myself. “Please.”
“On it,” Patti says, picking up the phone.
I’m already sprinting toward the door. “I know who’s been messing with us.”
And I know exactly why she’s after Vanessa.