Fool Me Forever (Confidence Game) Read online

  “Oh, hi.” Easton looked at Halsey like he’d never seen him before, because he hadn’t. Men like Easton only took in the details they could use to further their own needs, and Halsey had been a no one presence in the stairwell an hour ago.

  Easton shifted the flowers in his arms and held out a hand. “I’m Easton Bradshaw. I hope you’ll let me whisk my sister away for a moment. I messed up a little while ago, and I owe her the biggest apology.” He shook Halsey’s hand while looking at Lenny, because Halsey was still a no one, who didn’t bother to give his name.

  “If I’m interrupting, I’m sorry.” Easton took a step back and lowered his eyes, the picture of contrition. “I’ll wait.”

  “What are you doing here?” Lenny asked. For all the blooms and calories, she wasn’t dripping forgiveness.

  “Finish what you need to do, Len. I’ll wait.”

  Lenny frowned. “This is Halsey Sherwood. He’s my, ah, accountant. He’s just leaving.”

  No, hell no. A dislike of fieldwork didn’t mean he was leaving Lenny with her abusive asshole brother, who was in grand manipulation mode. Halsey made a show of slapping his head. “There’s one more thing I need to check. I’ll just—” He gestured to the laptop in Lenny’s office and then moved inside to her desk, where he had nothing to check and every intention of listening to Easton spin his psychopath’s web of deceit, which began before he’d even taken a seat.

  “I came to give you these, Len. I don’t know what got into me. I’m stressed, I’ve got loan payment deadlines to meet, but that was no excuse for treating you like I did. I went off the deep end. You know I never liked it that Dad used to do that to us. It’s been hard, all this change, and I don’t want to fail us, and I know you get that. You’re my only ally. The only one who understands me. Mom is too dazed to know what’s going on, and I’ve been thinking maybe you’re right about Mal. Maybe we need to get her into counseling.”

  “Great idea. You pay for it,” Lenny said flatly, making Halsey smile.

  “You know my money is already earmarked for the new business, otherwise, I would. Once we’re able to sell assets, there’ll be money. We only need to tide ourselves over till then.”

  “There is no money for us. After Dad’s creditors and the lawyers are paid, there’s nothing left.”

  “No, that’s just what the Feds are saying. There’ll be money. We just have this short-term stress.”

  “You’re wrong, but I’ll ask my accountant what he thinks.”

  Halsey grinned wider at that. Lenny was making Easton work for his apology.

  There was a pile of unopened mail on her desk. He picked it up and shuffled through it, stopping at a high-gloss, embossed envelope with the insignia of the United Heroes League on it. Hmm, could be trouble. He held it up to the light. The paper stock was too thick to see through. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit coat.

  In the other room, Easton said, “We need a little more expertise than your small-time bookkeeper.”

  He was right about that, given Halsey wasn’t a bookkeeper’s calculator despite his legitimate finance degree from a suitable Ivy League school and several forged ones from various other prestigious institutions. Still, he could out-calculate Easton without using all his fingers and toes. Lenny was correct. The Bradshaws were terminally broke.

  Easton was moving about, a heavy tread on the floorboards. “You’re still angry, but you pushed all my buttons, and you know I’m trying to do the best for us. If you won’t help me, then I suppose I’ll find another way.”

  Easton was a passive-aggressive shithead through and through. There was a rustling sound, paper crinkling, and then Lenny said, “You couldn’t give me money for groceries, but you bought me two dozen roses and eighty bucks worth of Jacques Torres chocolates.”

  “They’re your favorites.”

  A passive-aggressive shithead and a giant suck-up.

  “I can’t give you money from Dollars for Daughters,” Lenny said.

  “I know you think you can’t give me the money, and that’s okay. That’s about the advice you’re getting.” Oh-ho, another dig at the bookkeeper. That was A-class douchbaggery going down out there.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lenny wasn’t taking crap without a fight. “Are you suggesting I prioritize strangers over my family?”

  “You said that, not me. You do so much for Mom and Mal.”

  And there it was. Easton had turned up the guilt factor, insisting Lenny’s goodness wasn’t extended to him into a large blinking sign that said, You Don’t Love Me. Halsey had heard enough. He pressed his feet to the floor, but Lenny’s words stopped him.

  “Easton, listen carefully. I have no money to give you. I’m barely making it for Mom and Mal and me. I will never give you money from D4D for any reason ever.”

  “You don’t mean that, Len. You’ve always had the biggest heart.”

  “For any reason. Ever.”

  Cue stomping feet and door slam, followed by the crinkle of plastic wrap. Lenny appeared in the doorway with an open box of chocolates. “Show’s over.”

  She’d likely think applause was mockery, but it was deserved. He was impressed. She didn’t fall for any of that manipulative nonsense Easton dished out. “That was deft.”

  “Like I said, you don’t have to worry about me.” She took in the closed lid of her laptop. “You said you’d forgotten something.” She popped a heart-shaped chocolate in her mouth.

  “I lied.”

  She looked at the water-stained ceiling and then back to the tray of chocolates. She chose a dark one with pink and yellow Xs and Os on top, licked the pattern, popped it in her mouth, and spoke around it. “Pwese ’ust go.”

  “I have a concern.” It was a line in her spreadsheet and an embossed logo on the envelope in his pocket.

  “This is my private business, and you’re interfering in it.” No sugar coating it, like the chocolate now in her hand. She put the sugared ball in her mouth, crystals stuck to her lip, and he wet his own reflectively because the desire to lick hers came on him sharp and sudden.

  He coughed, pushing that thought down. “I think you’re so accustomed to being quietly terrorized by Easton you don’t notice the effect anymore. That makes you his perfect victim. You’re his frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. You don’t feel it heating so you never jump out.”

  Lenny reached to put the chocolate box on the desk and fumbled it. He righted the box before it spilled, and when he looked at her again, she turned her face away. Her family terror was very different from glitter in his bed and blue eyebrows.

  “In case you need me to express myself forcefully again, I’ve got this, and I can’t imagine why you care.”

  He tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, aligning them more precisely with his jacket sleeve. She deserved better from her brother, from the Heroes League, and from him. “Do I need a reason?”

  She pointed at the door.

  Apparently, he did.

  Chapter Four

  Jacques Torres chocolates weren’t Lenny’s favorites. They were, however, more than adequate for stress-eating purposes caused by the combination of various men trying her patience.

  She had years of practice handling Easton’s games, but Halsey Sherwood had to go stirring things up and inspiring forceful expressions with his intrusive spy action and his amateur diagnosis.

  Easton was a shitty brother. Still, for Halsey to call him a psychopath was unconscionable. Made her feel less awful about the glass throwing. She didn’t need his help dealing with family matters. She didn’t need his help for anything.

  Except maybe the odd sexual fantasy in the desert that was her romantic life, because Halsey had Hollywood good looks. No matter that just like his movie star doppelganger, Paul Newman, he was all gloss and no substance.

  Newman was Mom’s favorite actor. He played pool sharks and con men and gangsters. He played shady businessmen, convicts, fraudsters, and outlaws. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
he was a hard-drinking womanizer. In Where the Money Is he was an old guy who faked a stroke to get out of prison. And that’s before you got to the fact he played the ultimate grifter in the ultimate grifter move, The Sting.

  Halsey Sherwood was her personal Paul Newman, looking like he’d walked out of Sweet Bird of Youth or The Young Philadelphians and straight into her daydreams, and it would only reward him for being a crook if she let those fantasies influence her.

  Why would she even consider listening to him, anyway? If he claimed to know Easton, it was because it was like recognizing like, and he was a psychopath, too.

  Well, of course he was. He’d even admitted he’d lied to her, wouldn’t leave when she asked him to, and hung around to eavesdrop. What good, honest, caring, insanely handsome, unflappably calm man did that?

  Good thing she had chocolates, because she needed the sugar buzz. She looked at the box. Five left. She’d almost eaten the lot. No wonder she felt queasy. Breaking a few cheap glasses was probably healthier for you.

  Like always, she’d take none of Easton’s nonsense. Her worrying time was better spent on Mallory who was falling behind in her classes, secretive, impulsive, angry, and unstable.

  Mallory outright lied, told fantabulous stories, laughed when she was called out, was almost intolerably cruel to Mom, and showed no remorse. She was unreliable and suspicious and temperamental.

  There was one chocolate left. She might puke for more reasons than interfering Halsey Sherwood making her paranoid.

  She ate it anyway, stuck the roses in the sink with water, and went home where Mom greeted her with the words, “I thought we’d eat out.”

  Lenny put her purse down. She’d eaten eighty dollars’ worth of chocolate, about eighty billion calories, and she was still hungry. “You were going to get groceries today, and so maybe another time.”

  “I didn’t get them.”

  “You didn’t go to the market?”

  Mom laid her House and Garden over her crossed knee. “You know I hate the market.”

  “You’d hate starvation more.” Although secretly, Mom would probably get off on the weight loss, and the pointed look Lenny got said what words didn’t, that Mom thought Lenny could benefit from a good strong dose of starvation. As if that was something either of them would truly know the pain of.

  All Mom said was, “That’s why we should go out.”

  Lenny threw herself into an armchair. “You know what we said about eating out.”

  “I have to get used to people staring and whispering sometime.”

  “No.” Lenny frowned. “Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “I cleaned up the kitchen.” Mom waved her arm like a game show hostess and when Lenny didn’t laugh she said, “You’re mad about the groceries.”

  Not mad, just exasperated and so very tired. “We agreed that you’d do the grocery shopping and help me keep the apartment tidy.” Which Mom was singularly useless at doing after a lifetime of household staff.

  “I hate going to the market.”

  “We had this discussion. You’re home during the day, I’m at work, and Fin’s not here. I’ve got both our jobs to do, and you agreed to help out.”

  “I can never find anything. I know you said I’d get the hang of it. I don’t want to. Anyway, we’ll have groceries tomorrow. We should go out tonight.”

  There was a lot to unpack there. The thing to focus on was tomorrow. “You promise to go to the market tomorrow.”

  “I’ll order online. I thought we’d go to that nice little Italian where they have that gelato that keeps winning awards.”

  Lenny opened her mouth and closed it again. Mom made that nice Italian sound like a neighborhood cheap eats with red-and-white checked tablecloths and candles in chianti bottles. It was a four-star, limited bookings, upmarket shrine to tomato-based sauce. A modest meal would easily cost three hundred dollars.

  Mom stood and smoothed her dress. “I’m going to change quickly. We need to get moving. It’s for eight. Too far to walk, we’ll need a cab.”

  Down the hall a door opened, and Mallory appeared. Black everything. Jeans so tight they had to be hard to walk in, the knees torn out. Mal’s eyes almost blacked out.

  “You’re not wearing that,” said Mom.

  Lenny put her hands up. “Stop. We’re not going out. We can get something delivered.”

  “Oh my fucking God,” said Mal.

  “Language,” said Mom.

  “Fucking, fucking, fucking,” said Mal. “It’s just a word, Nicki. It’s fucking Shakespearean.”

  Lenny closed her eyes; they felt gritty and heavy. This was Mal all the time now, inflammatory. “Can we not argue, please. We’re not going out.”

  “You do not make all the decisions, Lenore,” said Mom.

  “Yeah, Lenore. You’re not the boss of us.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. We’re broke. I don’t have the money for meals out, and you both know it.”

  “Well pawn something, Len,” said Mal. “Sell the clothes you got too fat for. Oh, wait.” Her eyes rolled up and she raised a finger in question. “That would be all of them.”

  Exasperated, sugar saturated, and bone weary, Lenny looked at Mom. “Wade in any time with some on-the-fly-parenting.”

  “Nicki doesn’t know parenting from an aisle in the market, do you Mom?” said Mal.

  “Stop.” Lenny raised her voice. “We can’t keep doing this to each other. I can’t keep doing this.”

  Mal skirted the sofa and went for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asked.

  “Somewhere neither of you are,” Mal said and let the door bang on her way out.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Mom snapped, “That was your fault,” and she quit the living room, leaving Lenny five types of angry she didn’t have names for. She was over being the adult today.

  She made up a plate of mac and cheese, ate, cleaned the kitchen, and then lay on her bed fully dressed, because she was worried about Mal.

  She did not know how to be a better daughter, a better sister, or how to steer her family into calmer weather. Mom was so deeply in denial and reality challenged that a weekly grocery shopping trip was too much for her.

  Mal’s over-the-top bitch routine was a desperate cry for help or worse, maybe worse. Oh please, don’t let it be worse.

  And Easton habitually helicoptered in, painted himself as Mr. Fix It, and made Lenny the bad guy.

  Always, she was the bad guy. Halsey was as right about that as he was about how freeing it felt to smash that glass.

  At 10:00 p.m., she sent Mal a message.

  Please be home in the next hour.

  At midnight, unable to sleep, she called and got pushed to voicemail. “Mal, come home. We talked about you staying out on a school night.” Lenny had given up on trying to get her to come home at a reasonable hour on the weekend. It wasn’t only her chocolate and cheese diet making her feel sick. “Please come home.”

  Hoping for a response, she stared at her bedroom ceiling. Every day she was thankful for having inherited this apartment from her grandmother, because without an actual home, things would be dramatically worse.

  She dozed on her bed in her clothes with her phone ringer turned up to make sure she’d wake if Mal called. She dreamed Halsey Sherwood had given her wilted flowers and chocolates that tasted like chalk, broke her heart, and stole her money.

  Mallory never called.

  And Lenny overslept. She stumbled out of her bedroom to find Mal’s bed still made, but her clothes from last night in a jumble on the floor and her laptop bag gone. She’d been home, changed, and hopefully headed off to school.

  It wasn’t flowers and chocolates, but it was better than a cracked heart.

  Chapter Five

  Halsey tapped the envelope he’d taken from Lenny’s office on the top of his desk. The concern he’d felt when scanning her accounts had morphed into outrage in the shape of a one hu
ndred thousand-dollar 1970 forest green Mercedes-Benz 280SL Coupe Roadster after he followed the money trail.

  It was a gorgeous car, all original with only ten thousand miles on the clock. He coveted the car. He despised who now owned it, and the fact that D4D’s money had purchased it instead of a scholarship program.

  That was a criminal act. And there was no way he could let it stand.

  Given he came from generations of professional grifters, hustlers, fraudsters, and scammers, he knew how to spot corruption at one decimal point. What he’d spotted was inequality, greed, and exploitation, and it outraged him.

  At heart, a Sherwood was a wealth redistributor whose role in life was to take money from entitled, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, vindictive, racist, sexist, homophobic, tax-dodging billionaires and give it to those who could better use it for the good of all.

  What he was looking at here was the polar opposite. An entitled, self-aggrandizing, tax-dodging billionaire dictator named Aleksandrs Ozols, a.k.a. Sonny Ozols, or as his detractors referred to him—Cookie Jar—had stolen Lenny’s charity’s money and bought himself a car.

  All Halsey had left to do was open the envelope. It was the final piece of information he needed. He’d been through D4D’s accounts, made a few subtle adjustments, flagged the problem donation to the United Heroes League, and now he had to decide whether to open the envelope like a normal person who knew how to use a French Art Nouveau sterling silver letter opener or steam it open like your average con artist who intended to use what was inside as leverage.

  He was so aggrieved on Lenny’s behalf, what he really wanted to do was hit it with a flame thrower.

  He picked up the slim letter opener and rubbed his thumb over the nude figure of a woman stretched out on her back. The letter could be an invitation, an entreaty to get Lenny to donate more with flattery, wining and dining thrown in to soften the ask, or it could simply be a thank you for the donation already made.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter what was inside; it was toxic to Lenny. There was no need to smuggle it back to her office or to involve her in his outrage-fueled revenge fantasy. Oh, there would be revenge and it would need to be fantastic, but it would be best for everyone concerned if Lenny never knew about it.