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and business partners or the lawyer being so certain that his client was guilty. She’d wondered then if Jed had actually confessed to his friend.
Jed’s brow furrowed with lines of confusion. “It’s as if he was trying to convince you of my guilt when he was supposed to be doing everything in his power to prove my innocence.”
“He didn’t prove your innocence to a jury. He did a much better job of proving your guilt,” she said, “at least to me.”
Jed shook his head, as if trying to make sense of it all. “I thought he was my friend. He and Brandon and I all belonged to the same fraternity.”
“Brandon wasn’t really your friend,” she pointed out.
Jed must have realized how much his former fraternity brother and business partner had envied and resented him. But then Brandon had been very good at hiding that resentment behind a façade of charm and humor—otherwise she never would have spent any time with him—not even to stay connected to Jed.
“And apparently neither was Marcus,” Jed said with a heavy sigh. “So is he the one who framed me?”
Framed? The idea didn’t seem all that preposterous anymore. In fact it seemed highly likely, which both relieved and sickened her.
“It would explain why he knew how much evidence there was against you—if he planted it.” Just as he had planted the doubts in her muddled mind, so that she had done nothing when Isobel’s father had gone to prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. She should have at least talked to him, let him tell her his side of that night.
But she had worried that she would fall for his lies again.
What if she’d been wrong about him?
Her head pounded, and her stomach pitched as she realized the full impact of what she’d done…to Jed and their daughter. She had cost them three years together, and, from what she had seen on the news about the corruption at Blackwoods Penitentiary, she had nearly cost Jed his life.
* * *
     
“I CAN ’ T BELIEVE J ED K LEYN got out,” Marcus Leighton said, his hand shaking as he poured himself another drink.
“It was your job to make sure he stayed in prison for the rest of his life,” the man with Marcus reminded his partner in crime.
But Marcus had never really been a partner, just a greedy ally. Not even so much an ally as a puppet, really. Easily manipulated. Too easily…
Marcus stared up at his companion, his eyes already clouded with confusion and drunkenness. “I’m not responsible for him breaking out of prison.”
“He was supposed to die in prison.” That had been how the plan—the brilliant plan—was to have concluded.
“He’d only been inside three years.” Marcus was sober enough to remember. As if realizing that his brain was fogging, he pushed his glass aside. Alcohol sloshed over the rim and onto the case file lying on his mahogany desk. It was an antique, like most of the furnishings in the elegant office. Marcus enjoyed the finer things in life.
“Three years wasn’t long enough.” Jed wouldn’t have suffered enough. Not yet. If he had lasted just a few more years, an inmate would have been rewarded—just as Marcus’s ineptitude had been rewarded—for taking Jedidiah Kleyn’s life.
But maybe this was a better and far more satisfying conclusion to his plan. Now he would get to take Jed’s life himself—with his own hands. And he would be able to watch Jed’s face while he did it.
“He’ll be apprehended,” Marcus said. “It doesn’t matter how many other prisoners escaped during the riot, every cop is out there looking for Jed.”
He shook his head. “You heard that DEA agent on the news, didn’t you? The guy praises Kleyn for saving his life. He believes his claims of innocence.”
Marcus’s breath shuddered out. “That’s why he asked for copies of all my records. He already got the police files and court transcripts.”
His heart pounded a little faster. Marcus was so inept that he might have left something in those records that could lead back