Vendetta in Death (In Death #49)(33)

Francie paused, pressed her fingers to her eyes, then dropped them. “I can tell you this, with no hesitation or doubt. She was telling you the truth as she knows it. She believed him, absolutely, and she would have told no one but me about the other women. She needed her illusions, Lieutenant, so she believed him.”

Francie rose. “I’ll talk to her. I’ll do what I can.”

“One more question. Did you speak to anyone else about Mr. McEnroy?”

“Whatever Geena shared with me stayed between her and me. He broke her trust time after time in the past. I wouldn’t, couldn’t. I never would.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“She’ll want to see him,” Francie added as she walked them to the door. “If not tomorrow, then soon. She’ll need to see him.”

“I’ll arrange it.”

Eve stepped out, started for the elevator. “Don’t tell me I was hard on her.”

“Well now, you were hard on her, but you had to know, didn’t you?”

She jabbed the call button. “Know what?”

“If she knew what he was about, if she had any part in it, overtly or by her silence. If knowing, she finally had enough and helped arrange his murder. Or simply cried on shoulders who might do it for her.”

Saying nothing, Eve strode onto the elevator, jammed her hands in her pockets.

“And now you know,” Roarke finished, and called for the garage level. “So you can stop being hard on yourself for doing your job.”

Eve shot him a look. “You gave her strokes and pats.”

“I felt sorry for her, true enough—as did you. But it wasn’t my job to go hard. It seemed clear enough she’s one who needs someone to lean on likely in the best of times, so certainly in the worst of them. She has the tutor, her surrogate mother, but it seemed to me she’d respond to a man. Was I wrong in that?”

“No.” Eve hissed out a breath. “You’re a hundred percent right, which is why you’re the emperor of the business universe. You read people fast and accurate. You stay with someone who cheats on you, time after time, out of love—to a point. Love might be there, sure, but you really stay out of need, out of insecurity, out of not knowing what the hell else to do. She rings all the bells to me.”

“You don’t suspect her of having a part in his death after this.”

“If you don’t eyeball the spouse and eyeball hard, you’re stupid. But she’s about as low on the list as it gets. She didn’t know about the drugs. I’m betting some part of her knew he was still cheating, but she buried that. But not the drugs. She was shocked, and an instant later, even though she went off, she knew it was true.”

“I think you’re right on that.” Roarke led the way to the car, slid behind the wheel. Then he turned to Eve. “It’s why she denied it so strongly. The truth makes it impossible for her to keep believing she loved and stayed with a good man. He was a rapist, an opportunist, not just unfaithful. And he brought the women he victimized into her home, into her bed. How does she live with that, how does she keep his light shining for her daughters if she accepts the truth of it?”

Tired, tired to the bone, Eve let her head fall back against the seat. “She can accept whatever she wants at this point.”

“She’ll go after you,” he warned as he drove out of the garage. “The foundation of her world demands it.”

“Maybe. I’ll handle it.”

“I’ve no doubt.” He went quiet, letting her think until he approached the gates of home. “We joke about what each would do if the other strayed—and I admit you usually outdo me in creativity there. But the fact is we never would. It’s not only love that keeps us faithful. It’s respect, for each other, for ourselves. That’s a bond that holds.”

“I know it. Still, I can be even more creative if you ever tested it.”

“And I know that.”

He shot her a grin as he drove through the gates.

The house rose and spread, lights gleaming in the windows. Its turrets and towers speared under a glass-clear sky that opened the night to the April chill.

Home, she thought, no longer just the house he’d built, but home. Because they’d learned how to make it one together.

“I thought, when I first moved here, it couldn’t last. You’d realize: Jesus, what was I thinking with her? Or you’d start bitching about the job, the hours, and I’d start bitching about the wife-of-the-business-emperor deal, and it would all just go south.”

She turned to him as he pulled up in front of the house, then leaned over, took his face in her hands. Kissed him. “It’s really nice to be wrong.”

“I had moments when I wondered if you’d walk away, unable to accept who I am, who I was, what I’ve done. It’s very nice, yes, to be wrong.”

When they got out of the car, he met her, took her hand. “But then again, I knew I had you at the cat.”

“At the cat?”

“You brought Galahad here, and that I took as a sign in my favor.”

“Maybe I just wanted to dump him on you.”

“No,” Roarke said simply, and walked inside with her.

She shrugged out of her coat, tossed it over the newel post as Roarke hung his own in the closet. Then she simply stood there in the wide, quiet foyer.