The Parks Empire: Secrets, Lies and Loves: Romancing the Enemy. Marie Ferrarella
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He roused from his introspection. “Trouble.”
The hair prickled on the back of her neck. “What kind of trouble?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.” He finished off the omelette and the last drink of milk. “Got any coffee?”
“I’ll make you a latte.” She prepared the steamed milk and coffee, did one for herself, then returned. “Help yourself,” she said dryly, noting that he had devoured the other half of her muffin and jam and was swallowing the last of her milk.
“Sorry. I was still hungry.”
She handed him the steaming mug and settled onto the sofa again. “Has Mark Banning found our dear uncle?”
Tyler shook his head. “Someone tried to hack into my computer, though, and set up a worm to send everything I had on file to a third computer.”
Alarm spread through Sara. “Who?”
“I couldn’t trace ’em. They covered their tracks well.”
“Did they find out anything about our quest?”
“No. Fortunately I use a separate drive for all Internet searches and then check it for viruses and worms after each session on the Net. That’s when I discovered someone was trying to implant a tracking program on me.”
“We haven’t tried to hide,” she reminded him. “We use our real names. Do you think Walter Parks had anything to do with the hacker?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, I live next door to his son. Cade remembers me from years ago. If he mentioned me to his father, then Walter would know the Carltons—at least some of us—are back in town.”
“And he might wonder exactly what we’re doing here,” Tyler concluded.
“Only if he has a guilty conscience. Otherwise why would he care?”
Her brother snorted. “I’ve done some research on his business dealings. He’s known to be a ruthless competitor. I doubt his conscience bothers him much.”
“Cade doesn’t seem at all like his father,” she murmured, recalling the son’s determination to be a better parent to his daughter than his father had been to him and his siblings.
“Have you found out anything from him?” Tyler asked.
“Like what?”
“How the family business is prospering? The old man has been doing a lot of buying lately. There’s been a large payment to a foreign diamond dealer of dubious reputation through an overseas bank. There’s also been a couple of mysterious deliveries to his store of late. Uninsured deliveries by courier.”
“So?”
Her brother shrugged. “So, I don’t know. Too bad the company is family-owned. Their records are private, so it’s more difficult to check on their business dealings. But not impossible,” he added. “Twenty-five years ago, the Parks empire seemed to take off. Where did the money come from?”
“The Carlton diamond business that apparently somehow disappeared into thin air without a trace just as Father did during that ill-fated yachting party?”
“That’s what I think,” her brother confirmed her guess.
Sara sipped the latte while she thought. “You and Nick and Mark Banning have the inside track on the investigation. I feel rather useless in the grand scheme of things. What do you want me to do?”
“Feed me when I drop by?” Tyler suggested with a grin, then became serious again. “The son knows the business. Can you get him to talk about the family’s fortunes? See if he knows how much was inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Walter Parks didn’t have much but ambition and a sharp mind before he married. As soon as his father-in-law died, two years after the marriage, Walter changed the name of the company from Lindsay Mining to Parks Mining and Exploration.”
Sara glanced at her brother in surprise at this news. “You have been busy. There’s something that occurs to me as sort of suspicious. Remember Mark told us that shortly after the party on the yacht, Walter sent his wife to a Swiss sanitarium?”
“Swiss, huh? I don’t think Mark knows that. I’ll have him start checking—”
“Sorry, that was just a manner of speaking. In novels, people always get sent to reclusive Swiss hospitals high in the mountains when their kin want to get rid of them. Anyway, Anna Parks was sent overseas somewhere when Cade was a child. He said the children never saw her, that his father said she wouldn’t care about them.”
“So?”
Sara frowned intently into the middle distance while she marshaled her thoughts. “Don’t you think that’s rather convenient and coincidental? According to Mother, Anna was present at the celebration aboard the yacht. What if she saw her husband have a quarrel with his partner? Maybe they got into a fight and our father, sorry, my father—”
“It’s okay. I still think of Jeremy Carlton as my father, too,” Tyler assured her.
“So maybe Jeremy fell and broke his neck or something. Then Walter panicked and threw the body overboard and Anna witnessed the whole thing. If she insisted her husband go to the police with the truth, then he might have needed to shut her up. What better way than to get her committed to an asylum for the insane in a foreign country?”
“Good point,” Tyler murmured.
“Also,” Sara continued. “When did he go into the retail business? It seems to me it would take a lot of money to open a jewelry store, and now he owns two of the most prestigious ones in California. Was that after our family somehow lost everything?”
Tyler ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets as if he could erase the weariness. He covered a huge yawn before answering. “He has a way of taking over any enterprise he’s involved in while his partners—I use that term loosely—have a way of losing out.”
“Or disappearing,” Sara reminded him. “Tyler, be careful. I feel threatened. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I have this odd feeling, like a noose tightening around us. Both of us.”
He patted her arm as he rose. “I always pay attention to hunches and odd feelings. I think we’re making someone nervous—”
“Walter Parks,” she said grimly, also standing and walking toward the front to see him out.
“Yeah. Are you going to back out?”
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Just a feeling.” He gave her an insouciant grin, then nodded his head toward the other town house. “He was pretty interested to see who rode up front with me and who rode in the back with Nick when we went to dinner Saturday night. Anything going on between you two that I should know about?”
Sara sighed and wrinkled her nose at her smart-mouthed sibling. “He’s very attractive,” she finally admitted.
“Aha,” Tyler said softly as they arrived at the front door and paused there.
“It’s confusing. He doesn’t seem ruthless. In fact, he’s a wonderful father.”
“Even an animal looks after its own.”
“I know. He’s my enemy and yet…” She shrugged.
Tyler studied her for a few seconds, then rubbed his brow as if his head hurt. “Sometimes lightning strikes, and there you are, burned to the core.”
The words were so startling, so much like a confession, that Sara was startled. “Tyler, have you met someone? Are you in love?”
His brief laughter was tinged with bitterness. “Hardly. It was nothing. A one-night stand.”
Sara was confused.