Page 28 of Captivated By You
She glanced at me, wide brown eyes now narrowed and sad. “Well, I have.”
“Why?” I attempted to tease. “Were you involved in some foreign espionage or something?”
“Not me,” she mumbled. “But it wouldn’t surprise me at this point. Here.”
She turned the iPad screen toward me and the first thing I saw was Claudia. Front and center on the screen, dressed in a fitted black dress that stopped just at her knees. She had on a black, wide-brimmed hat, eyes covered with large sunglasses. Her hair had been curled and bounced right on her shoulders, lips painted a deep, dark red. She held one single white rose in her fingers as well as a white handkerchief. Dressed like that, lips pressed into a frown, she was almost the startling image of a young, Jackie O.
“What the hell?” I asked as I read the headline.
Daughter of Georgia Supreme Court Judge
Attends Funeral of Family’s Murder-Suicide.
And below the thick bold letters was a smaller, but still bold tagline.
Judge Keith Townsend and his wife, Sheila Townsend, were laid to rest today. Townsend took his life after murdering his own wife. Investigators believe the murder-suicide is connected to Judge Townsend’s relationship with Alton Fitzgerald and crimes both of have been accused of in recent months.
My ribs tightened around my heart, making breathing difficult. Holy fucking shit.
Across the table, Claudia had become a statue. Spine straight, lips pressed so tightly together they almost disappeared. Her gaze was on the iPad in my hands and even when I set it down, she didn’t turn away from it.
“Alton Fitzgerald is part of the Montague dynasty in Savannah. They essentially ran the city, the state, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alton thought he could run the country for as powerful as he was. He was also connected, and one of the men connected to him was my father.”
“The judge?” I asked but it was unnecessary. The image of Claudia on the screen was now burned into my mind’s eye forever.
“As Alton’s dynasty began crumbling, multiple crimes he’d had covered up over the last decade were revealed. At the center of many of them, my father was implicated.”
Her quivering chin was the only emotional glimpse this was killing her to tell me. Fucking Christ. I’d known she was hiding something, but nothing could have prepared me for this.
“Three months ago, my father sent me to the spa. Said I should have a day off to relax because he knew how much the stress of our life disintegrating had been on me.” She laughed sadly, wiped beneath her eyes even though she hadn’t shed a single tear. “I came home to our house surrounded by police cars and ambulances and a fire truck.” Dark, swirling chocolate eyes settled on me, and a chill doused my spine. “He’d called them after he shot my mother, before he took his own life. I learned later he even told the dispatcher he didn’t want me to be the one to find them.”
“The fuck?”
It was all I could say. There were no sympathies I could give this woman in front of me. Nothing I could say to take away the gut-wrenching pain she was dealing with, had been living with.
She shook her head and looked away, despair in her eyes but still the perfect posture, like she was afraid of being weak.
I scanned the article, learning everything I could in the silence that followed, and then I clicked on another dozen of them, scanning those.
Her father had shot her mother and killed himself because, from what sources said, neither wanted to continue living under the scorn and shame Judge Townsend had brought to his family. What a fucking dick.
Her proper manners and the way she carried herself started making sense. Claudia Townsend had been raised in wealth and prestige. She’d been raised to be perfect, a socialite among some of the wealthiest citizens of Savannah. Hell, if the courts hadn’t seized most of her father’s wealth, she wouldn’t have had to worry about working a day in her life again.
But they did seize her family’s wealth, most of it, anyway.
And she did have to work.
“This why you came to Infidelity?”
“No.” She shook her head again. Her laugh a little less sad and the smile on her lips remained a moment before she turned back to me and sipped her wine. “I came to New York to get away from the gossip and the scandal and wanted to blend in with millions. Plus,” she shrugged, “Karen is my mom’s sister. And my last remaining relative.”
“Karen is your aunt?”
“Her assistant is out on maternity leave so she offered me the temporary job there until I could get settled. Paid for my apartment for a year and furnished it.”
Which explained why when I was dealing with all the contractual bullshit, the living expenses had been drastically less than I’d considered they would be.
“So why are you here, then?” She didn’t need the money. Not twenty grand a month. She certainly didn’t seem all that impressed with my lifestyle. My body, maybe, but not my life.
Her tongue swiped her lips and my gaze stayed focused on hers while she rolled them together. I could practically see her debating what to tell me when she turned, pressed her palms to the glass tabletop.
“Because I needed the money to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. Because I had the perfect upbringing to be on some wealthy man’s arm for a year. And because I wanted to experience life outside the life of country clubs and societal expectations of me.”
That was part of the truth. Not all of it. “What else?” I pressed.
Her pause told me what I needed to know. What she wasn’t telling me was the crux of what she was looking for. What she wanted.
As her cheekbones turned a raspberry shade of red, I never, in a million years expected her answer to be what she said.
“Because I wanted to do something stupid and get rid of my virginity and I figured this was the safest way to do it.”
