Presumed Guilty

trust fund to keep them in caviar. Like some families I know,” she added, leaving no doubt by the tone of her voice just which family she was referring to.

He acknowledged the insult with a brief silence.

“I’m surprised you fell for Richard,” he said. “Considering your attitude toward trust-funders.”

“Before I knew Richard, I didn’t have an attitude problem.” She turned to confront him. “Then I got to know him. I saw what the money did to him. For him. He never had to struggle. He always had that green buffer to protect him. It made him careless. Immune to other people’s pain.” Her jaw came up in a pose of proud disdain. “Just like you.”

“Now you’re making the assumptions about me.”

“You’re a Tremain.”

“I’m like you. I have a job, Miranda. I work.”

“So did Richard. It kept him amused.”

“Okay, maybe you’re right about Richard. He didn’t need to work. The Herald was more of a hobby to him, a reason to get up in the morning. And he got a kick out of telling his friends in Boston that he was a publisher. But that was Richard. You can’t slap that rich-boy label on me because it won’t stick. I was booted out of the family years ago. I don’t have a trust fund and I don’t own a mansion. But I do have a job that pays the bills. And, yes, keeps me amused.”

His anger was tightly controlled but evident all the same. I’ve touched a nerve, she thought. An acutely sensitive one. Chastened, she sat in a chair by the fireplace. “I guess — I guess I assumed a few too many things.”

He nodded. “We both did.”

In silence they gazed at each other across the room. A truce, however uneasy, had at last settled between them.

“You said you were booted out of the family. Why?” she asked.

“Simple. I got married.”

She looked at him in puzzlement. He had said the words without emotion, with the tone of voice one used to describe the weather. “I take it she wasn’t a suitable bride.”

“Not according to my father.”

“The wrong side of the tracks?”

“In a manner of speaking. My father, he was attuned to that sort of thing.”

Naturally, she thought. “And was your father right? About those girls from the wrong side of the tracks?”

“That wasn’t why we got divorced.”

“Why did you?”

“Christine was too…ambitious.”

“Hardly a flaw.”

“It is when I’m just the rung on the social ladder she’s trying to climb.”

“Oh.”

“And then we had some lean years. I was working all the time, and…” He shrugged. Another silence stretched between them.

“Richard never told me what kind of work you do.”

He leaned back, the tension easing away from his face. Unexpectedly he laughed. “Probably because what I do struck him as so damn boring. My partners and I design office buildings.”

“You’re an architect?”

“Structural engineer. My architect partners do the creative work. I make sure the walls don’t come crashing down.”

An engineer. Not exactly a fluff career, she thought, but a real, honest job. Like her father had.

She shook her head. “It’s strange. When I look at you, I can’t quite believe you’re his brother. I always assumed…”

“That we’d be a matched set? No, we were definitely different. In more ways than you’ll ever know.”

Yes, the more she knew about Chase, the less he seemed like a Tremain. And the more she thought she could like him.

“What did you ever see in my brother?” he asked.

His question, voiced so softly, was jarring all the same. It reminded her of the ghosts that still hovered in this house.

She sighed. “I saw what I wanted to see.”

“Which was?”

“A man who needed me. A man I could play savior to.”

“Richard?”

“Oh, it seemed as if he had everything going for him. But he also had this…this vulnerability. This need to be saved. From what, I don’t know. Maybe himself.”

“And you were going to save him.”

She gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t know. You don’t think about these things. You just feel. And you fall into it….”

“You mean you followed your heart.”

She looked up at him. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Didn’t it seem wrong to you?”

“Of course it did!”

“But?”

Her whole body sagged with the weight of her unhappiness. “I couldn’t…see my way out of it. I cared about him. I wanted to be there for him. And he’d string me along. He’d tell me things would work out, as long as we both had faith.” She looked down at her hands, clasped together in her lap. “I guess I lost my faith first.”

“In him? Or the situation?”

“Him. I began to see the flaws. It came out, after a while. How he manipulated people, used people. If he didn’t need you, he’d ignore you. A user, that’s what he was. An expert at making people do what he wanted.”

“Then you broke it off. How did he react?”

“He couldn’t believe it. I don’t think anyone ever left him. He kept calling me, bothering me. And every day, at work, I’d have to face him. Pretend nothing was going on between us.”

“Everyone knew, though.”

She shrugged. “Probably. I’m not very good at hiding things. Annie knew, because I told her. And everyone else must have guessed.” She sighed. The truth was, she hadn’t cared at the time. Love, and then pain, had made her indifferent to public opinion.

They said nothing for a moment. She wondered what he thought of her now, whether any of it made a difference. Suddenly it mattered what he did think of her. He was scarcely more than a stranger, and a hostile one, but it mattered very much.

“You’re not the first one, you know,” he said. “There were other women.”

It was a cruel revelation to spring on her, and Chase didn’t know why he did it. He only knew that he wanted to give her a good, hard shaking. To shatter any rose-colored illusions she might still harbor about Richard. She might say the feelings were gone, but deep inside, might a few warm memories still linger?

He saw, by the look in her eyes, that his words had had their intended effect. Instantly he regretted the wounds he’d inflicted. Still, shouldn’t she know? Shouldn’t she be told just how naive she’d been?

“Were there many?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

She looked away, as though to hide the pain from view. “I–I think I knew that. Yes, I must have known that.”

“It’s just the way he was,” said Chase. “He liked being admired. He was like that as a boy, too.”

She nodded. And he realized, yes, she did know that about Richard. On some level she must have sensed his unquenchable thirst for admiration. And tried to satisfy it.