Face it, you can’t remember.
Not now, anyway.
Glancing at his scruffy reflection in the mirror, he considered his lack of memory and decided it might just be for the best.
CHAPTER 13
If James Cahill thought he was going to get off the hook that easy, he had another think coming, Charity decided as she drove to her apartment, a studio cut into what had once been the maid’s quarters in a larger home. She pulled into the driveway and eyed the place.
It appeared right smack out of a damned Currier and Ives lithograph: a three-storied Victorian with snow on the roof and even icicles hanging from the eaves. Years before, the grand old home had been sliced into five apartments, including the owner’s living quarters on the main floor. Another unit was housed in the basement; two more were on the second floor; and finally the smallest, Charity’s studio, was tucked into the third floor.
She knew her neighbors by sight and by their names on the mailboxes, but that was about it. The guy in the basement kept to himself—some kind of computer nerd, she thought and wondered if he was really into porn or something nefarious; she told herself that she had to check that out. The people on the second floor were a couple, and the wife was pregnant. Oh, goody. Soon there would be a screaming baby. Charity could hardly wait. The only semi-normal person in the whole place was a woman of about forty or so in the apartment below hers, neighbor to the pregnant couple on the second floor. And that woman—Maribelle Edwards—just happened to work at Cahill Industries as a cook, which, Charity decided, was a stroke of luck. She reminded herself to cozy up to Maribelle, take over a bottle of wine and loosen her lips about what went on behind the closed doors of the hotel.
She hurried into the foyer and took the stairs to her apartment. It was messy, with a couple of pairs of jeans left on the floor, a comforter sliding off the couch, and an array of glasses left on tables—but compared to the mess she’d caught a glimpse of at James Cahill’s place, her home looked shipshape.
Kinda.
As she locked the door behind her, she kicked off her boots, then shrugged out of her coat and adjusted the heat on the thermostat, which had two settings: colder than Antarctica in winter and hotter than hell. She opted for the latter.
Still burned by Cahill, she found an opened bottle of wine in the fridge, poured herself a glass of merlot, and slid up to the table that doubled as her desk. As the space started to warm, she took a couple of long swallows, then fired up her laptop.
Time to find out more about James Cahill. She planned to go into the office in the morning armed with a ton of information and insist the editor hand her the Megan Travers story. It was hers, dammit, and Seamus O’Day, that decrepit old ex-jock, wasn’t doing jack shit. It was time someone, namely Charity, took the bull by the horns and exposed Cahill for the fraud that he was.
She felt certain he knew more than what he was saying.
Amnesia?
Ha.
What were the chances?
“Slim to none,” she said aloud and started with Google.
She found information on the old scandals involving the Cahill family and felt a warm glow surround her. From the whiskey and wine? Maybe. But probably because she knew she was about to blow the roof off the frickin’ James Cahill/Megan Travers story.
“Take that,” she said aloud as she skimmed article after article on Marla Cahill and her daughter Cissy and, drum roll, sweet little James.
Not so friggin’ innocent.
Sipping from her glass, she read and printed out the stories that caught her eye. The Cahill family was from old San Francisco money and had been wealthy for generations. They’d established Cahill House for pregnant girls who had nowhere to turn. They’d suffered through scandals involving sex, money, lies, and buried secrets that just wouldn’t stay hidden. Through it all, the damned family had flourished, even though the matriarch, Eugenia, was now dead, yet another victim of murder.
Homicide and mental disorders ran through the Cahill family history, and now, she wondered, was this current crisis being covered up again, by James, the youngest heir and golden boy? Could he have somehow killed his girlfriend and hidden her body, then stooped so low as to injure himself to cover up his crime?
That seemed unlikely, and there was the rumor that Megan had been on her way to see her sister after their fight. So, if Megan was alive when she left James, was it possible that he had had an accomplice who’d helped him, or had he caught up with her himself and killed her?
She leaned back in her chair and thought it all out.
Somehow, someway she was going to find out all of James Cahill’s secrets.
And she was going to dig up all the dirt on his family.
He wasn’t the only one who had connections in San Francisco. Her aunt lived in Oakland, just a short drive across the bay, and it was the holiday season. Maybe it was time for Charity to reconnect with family and combine a business trip with pleasure. Merry, merry, and all that crap.
Smiling to herself, Charity walked back to the kitchen, where she topped off her glass, then picked up her phone and scrolled through her contacts to see if she still had Aunt Maureen’s phone number.
* * *
The dream was so real.
A woman nuzzling up to him, kissing him, her breath hot and warm against his skin as he lay on the bed. James moaned from deep in his throat as she slid her tongue down his chest and lower.
He
