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willed herself not to care, intent on getting him to agree to help her. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
    “You can’t pay me enough to take your case.”
    “I’m not talking about money.”
    He did another head to toe scan, this time letting his eyes linger at the tops of her thighs and on her breasts. To her horror she could feel heat collecting between her legs and her nipples harden against the front of her chest.
    He finally moved his gaze to her face and gave her another shake of his head. “No offense, Carrie, but been there, done that, and it doesn’t look like it’s improved much with age.”
    “That wasn’t what I was talking about, but trust you to go straight for the gutter. I have information you might be able to use.”
    “Oh yeah, what’s that?”
    “Information that connects your mother to my husband.”
    He froze, every cell on alert like a predator ready to pounce. “What, exactly, did you find?”
    “Oh no,” she shook her head, faking bravado. “Not until we have a deal.”
    He grabbed her arm, moving so fast his hand was little more than a blur as it reached out. “Don’t fuck with me, Caroline. What did you find?”
    “Help me clear my name.”
    His grip tightened, hovering on the edge of pain. “So you’ve become a blackmailer as well as a gold digger? Nice.”
    She swallowed hard, not about to let him see how much that hurt. “I’m bargaining. There’s a big difference. You help me, I help you.”
    “If you have evidence you should turn it over to the police.”
    “I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but the police and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms these days. I’d rather we handle this ourselves.”
    His fingers flexed, then loosened one by one. He took a step back and slipped his hands in his trouser pockets. His suit jacket flipped back, revealing a mile-wide chest tapering down to a lean waist and hips. “Thanks, but no thanks. If my mom had a connection to your husband, I’m sure I’ll find it on my own.”
    Panic set in, along with desperation as she realized how badly she’d tipped her hand. “You really think you can find it, when for eighteen years you never found anything that linked her to James?”
    “That’s because we didn’t know where to look. Now thanks to you, we do. Nice seeing you again, Caroline.”
    This time he was the one who strode away without a backward glance, his casual dismissal his final fuck you.
     
    “I thought you said we were going to get something to eat,” Kaylee Edwards said. Hunger scraped at her belly. She hadn’t had anything to eat since the afternoon before, when she’d managed to scrape together enough change to buy a taco.
    “I told you I had to run an errand first,” Ericka, who was in the driver’s seat, had to almost yell to be heard over the ancient Ford’s rumbling exhaust system.
    Kaylee tried to calm the sense of dread that rose up, mixing with the hunger as she watched miles go by with nothing but grass covered hills spotted with oak trees. They were more than two hours out of Sacramento, had left interstate 80 forty-five minutes ago, and Ericka’s errand was out in the middle of fucking nowhere.
    Kaylee rubbed at her temples, trying to ease the throb that came from going too long without food and kept her mouth shut. Ericka had offered her a safe place to stay and an introduction to her manager, and Kaylee wasn’t about to mess this up.
    It was the break Kaylee had been hoping for when she spent the last of her money on a bus ticket to get her away from Wichita nearly two weeks ago. The night before she left, she’d woken up with her twenty-four-year-old loser of a stepbrother on top of her, one hand over her mouth, his dick out as he tried to shove her boxers down her legs. The scream he’d let out when Kaylee sank her teeth into his palm brought her stepfather running.
    But instead of beating the crap out of Jimmy, Don had gone on a drunken tirade about what a slutty cock