LITMIR.BIZ

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flashed her boss’s extension. “Look, Lara, I have to go.”

      “Me, too,” Lara said in obvious relief. “Bye, Keely. I’ll call you.”

      Yeah. Keely would hold her breath for that one. She pushed down the hurt and punched the button by the flashing light. “This is Keely.”

      “Keely, Ron. Can I see you in my office?”

      Ron Arnold, her boss. Normally if he wanted to talk with her, he just stuck his head into her office when he walked by. This time, he was summoning her. With a sense of foreboding, Keely rose.

      Since the day she’d walked in on Bradley, work had been the only part of her life that had been remotely normal. Normal, that was, if you discounted the crowd of paparazzi that camped out around the entrance of Briarson, snapping photos and shoving their microphones in her face. After all, it wasn’t every day one of the hottest couples on the social scene got busted for white-collar crime. They couldn’t find Bradley, so Keely was the next best thing, a photo to run next to the stories. “Fiancée and suspected accomplice Keely Stafford.” Only she and Bradley knew their engagement was off.

      “Sit down, Keely.” Stocky and balding, Ron Arnold had been her department head ever since she’d been at Briarson. “How are you?”

      “Fine,” she said automatically.

      Arnold’s gaze wasn’t unsympathetic, though she wasn’t sure pity was any easier to tolerate than the judgmental or frankly curious looks she got from the rest of the staff. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through. It can’t be easy.”

      Easy? Hounded by the press, watched by the authorities, returning at night to the shambles of her invaded home, no sanctuary anywhere? No, it hadn’t been easy. “I’ll survive,” she said.

      “Have you seen this?” He laid a folded copy of the New York Post down on his desk. It showed Keely walking into the building amid a crowd of reporters, her head down, her coat bundled about her. And on the wall behind her, clearly legible, was the Briarson Financial name.

      “I’m sorry, Ron. I’ve tried getting here early, staying late. They’re always after me, wherever I go.”

      “Hard to escape. Kind of like ticks that way,” he said.

      She gave him a grateful smile. “If it wasn’t for this place right now, I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d go crazy.”

      “Keely.” He hesitated. “There’s been some concern from higher up in the organization. We’ve gotten calls from clients who’ve read your name in the papers. Some of the accounts you’re working on.”

      Of course, she thought with a sinking heart. Keely Stafford, accountant at Briarson Financial, the center of an embezzling scheme. Not exactly the kind of thing a client wanted to hear.

      “Your work here the past three years has been top notch. All of your reviews have been outstanding, even with the high-pressure accounts. We can’t have our clients upset and doubting the organization, though. And every time you show up again in the press it only gets worse. I’ve been trying to keep things on an even keel but the higher-ups are demanding I do something. I think you understand.”

      Her lips felt cold. “Are you letting me go?”

      “Not now,” he said. “But we need you to take a leave of absence.”

      To where? The confines of an apartment that didn’t feel like hers anymore? To the streets or a hotel, to be hounded by the press? “Ron,” she began helplessly.

      “Don’t you have family in Connecticut?” Arnold cut in.

      “Chilton.”

      “Good. Go there. Take the rest of the month. Go home. After all,” he said, “it’s Christmas.”

      Chapter Two

      How had it happened? Lex Alexander wondered as he drove down the snow-bedecked main drag of Chilton, Connecticut. How was it he was back in Chilton, where everything looked just the same, from the herringbone parking on Main Street to the wrought iron arches that spanned the boulevard? The benches on the town common were green now, rather than the white they’d been twelve years before, but otherwise, little had changed in the time he’d been away.

      Except him.

      He’d hitchhiked, stowed away and knocked around the less savory parts of pretty much every continent on the globe since he’d turned his back on Alexander Technologies and everything that went with it. He’d sought out places most people in their right minds fled. And those who didn’t faced them armed with a hell of a lot more than just their wits. He was nuts, some said.

      If anything he did showed he was nuts, it was coming back to Chilton.

      He’d known he was in trouble when he’d heard his mother’s voice crackle over the phone. The fact that Olivia Alexander had tracked him down on the back side of nowhere was impressive in itself. In the places he frequented, he wasn’t Aubrey Pierce Alexander III, he was just Lex, the man he’d made himself into since he’d turned his back on the role of heir apparent, turned his back on his autocratic bastard of a father. Or non-bastard, rather, since nobody had more impeccable breeding than the late Aubrey Pierce Alexander II—Pierce, to nearly everyone who knew him.

      As for Lex, he’d been dubbed Trey at birth. Trey. Version 3.0. He hadn’t even gotten a name of his own, let alone a life. Pierce had been relentless in his expectations and pressure. Any step outside the narrow box Pierce had defined earned discipline; the greater the rebellion, the greater the response. Aubrey Pierce Alexander III was by God going do what was expected of him.

      What happened when an irresistible force met an immovable object? In Lex’s case, what happened was that he walked away with little more than the clothes on his back. Walked away from the expectations, the family, the eight-figure trust fund. Walked away to remake himself.

      Forget about Alexander Technologies. He’d been happy to leave that to his younger brother, Bradley, who’d always seemed to relish being the corporate G-boy and society-column staple.

      But Bradley had apparently dug himself a hole that was threatening to swallow him up—and their mother, too. Maybe there were guys out there who could have ignored that desperate call and gone on with their lives, but Lex wasn’t one of them.

      No matter how tough he wanted to think he was.

      God knew coming home was the last thing he wanted to do. If his father had been alive, it flat out wouldn’t have happened, but the old man was gone and Lex knew damned good and well that his mother wasn’t up to dealing with this on her own. Olivia Alexander might run the local DAR chapter and organize two-hundred-plate benefits with the efficiency of a general planning a military campaign, but she was unequal to facing the authorities and family ruin alone.

      Lex pulled his rental car off onto a wide, quiet residential road bordered by stone walls, and felt the familiar sense of suffocation. Beyond the walls, at intervals, rose the stone and brick mansions of the Chilton ton, all decked out in their holiday finery.

      The sudden urge hit him to just keep on driving. There were a dozen places he’d rather be, a dozen things he’d rather be doing. But first, he had to finish what he’d come here for.

      And who knew how long that would take?

      With a swing of the wheel that was as irritated as it was automatic, he pulled into the driveway that led to the Alexander estate and stopped at the intercom by the gates to press the button.

      “Hello? Who is it?” A maid’s voice, unfamiliar, not surprisingly. What was he supposed to answer? Lex would draw a blank. Aubrey Pierce III wouldn’t do much better. “Trey Alexander,” he said finally, and the gate buzzed open.

      Trey Alexander. The person he’d thought he’d left behind. The life he’d thought he’d left behind.

      He passed up the drive and pulled the car to a stop at the front steps

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