Kelly actually jerked in response to the brittle words. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that justice for your father was never important to you, and you’ve evidently tried to wipe the memory from your life completely.”

Justice was important to Kelly, but she was too jaded now to believe anything like justice was possible in the world. And her mother was right about her wiping the trauma with her father completely out of her life. She made a point of never thinking about it—any more than she had to—since it simply hurt too much.

Today had proven that, if nothing else did.

“What good would it do to dredge it up now? And what does Caleb Marshall have to do with it?”

It was strange to associate a name with the man she’d fucked a little while ago. He didn’t feel like a Caleb to her, although she wasn’t sure what name would suit him better.

Her mother’s face was ice cold as she bit out the next words. “Caleb Marshall is the CEO of Vendella and Co.”

If she’d been slapped across the face, Kelly couldn’t have been more stunned. She saw white for a moment as her brain tried to process what she’d just been told.

She’d known the man was a business suit power player. She wasn’t surprised he was an executive at some big company. But not Vendella. She couldn’t even take it in.

Vendella had killed her father.

Her father had been a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company called Vendella and Co., which, as it turned out, was not an enviable position when results didn’t come back like they wanted.

“Yes,” her mother went on. “He’s the CEO.”

“He’s too young,” Kelly gasped, clinging to the threads of reason. “He’s too young. Eighteen years ago, he’d have been—he’d have been in his twenties. Way too young.”

“He wasn’t the CEO then. He is now.”

This piece of information allowed Kelly to take a full breath. “Then it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.” She was leaning over in her chair with her arms hugging her stomach.

If she’d just fucked the man who gave the order for her father to be killed, then she might have to go drown herself in her bathtub.

“Are you really so naïve? You think only one man was responsible? Marshall wasn’t the CEO then, but he was working for Vendella. He was a project manager. He managed your father’s project.”

Kelly lost her breath again and leaned over farther. “So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying his entire career is thanks to the success of that one project. What do you think would have happened if your father had gone through with exposing those damaging findings? Caleb Marshall would have been ruined. Are you going to sit there and tell me Marshall wouldn’t have done anything to stop that from happening?”

Kelly thought about Caleb, the man who had just fucked her hard and rough against a tree. That man was powerful. Ambitious. Frighteningly intelligent. Used to getting anything he wanted.

She could fully see him being utterly ruthless if something stood in his way.

Her father.

She raised her hand to her mouth.

“You see it now too,” her mother said. “It’s in his nature.”

“Do you have…proof?” Kelly had trouble speaking, since her throat was closing up.

Her mother handed her a sheet of paper.

It took Kelly a few moments to focus on the words, but then she read what was evidently a memo.

It came back to her then. She’d seen this memo before. It was the piece of evidence that her mother had used to try to get the police to make a case against Vendella.

It was a memo written by her father, saying he was concerned about some of the research he was doing on a potential new medication they were developing.

Kelly stared and stared and stared at the name on the TO: line. Caleb Marshall.

“This isn’t real proof,” she said at last. “It doesn’t mean he had him killed.”

“Of course it’s not real proof. If I had any new proof, I would have tried the police again. They wouldn’t believe me now any more than they believed me back then.”

The police had closed the case quickly, calling it a random mugging, since her father’s wallet had been taken. Her mother had believed differently from the very beginning, since she’d known her husband had decided to blow the whistle on the company once they’d continued pursuing the development of the medication despite the problematic findings. But no one believed her. With nothing else to do, she’d spent months filling Kelly’s head with bitter hate for Vendella, making her listen as her mother scoured memos and reports and endless files, searching for concrete evidence to implicate Vendella in the murder. Kelly had believed her mother, turning Vendella into a kind of monster in her mind.

Even now, the sound of the company’s name caused a chill to break through her spine.

But there had never been any proof. No one believed her mother. And finally the woman had just walked out on everyone.

Including Kelly.

“Then why do you think it was Cal—”

“Because it’s his name on the memo. He knew what your father knew, and he knew your father wasn’t going to let it go. He had the most to lose, and he was the one who gained the most from the murder. Use your brain! Obviously, the top-level executives would have been involved, but in any scenario, Caleb Marshall would have been at least partly responsible.”

It did make sense. Kelly couldn’t imagine a scenario where the project manager wouldn’t know that one of his research scientists was about to turn on the company—unless no one knew at all, when obviously they did.

Her mother handed her a file of papers, and Kelly opened it with trembling hands, staring down at it blankly until the words unblurred again. It was a dossier on Caleb. His picture—grinning smugly at the camera—and the details of his birth, the son of a self-made millionaire, his childhood in DC, his education at fancy private schools and then the Ivy League for college on an accelerated track and a joint graduate degree in business and medicine. He’d climbed the corporate ladder quickly—too quickly to be the result of nothing but hard work.

He was either blessed with the kind of luck the gods only dreamed of or he wasn’t afraid of taking shortcuts.

Kelly flipped the pages of the file. Stacks of articles, documents, correspondence from his years at Vendella. “Where did you get all this?”

“I’ve been working with a private investigator. Read through all that, and you’ll see the lengths he’ll go to to get his way. It’s not a pretty picture.”

“The detective hasn’t been able to get any proof about the murder though?”

“Nothing that will cause the authorities to change their minds.”

“So, what am I supposed to do?”

“How did you get along with Marshall?”

“What do you mean?” Finally, Kelly looked up from the file to catch a coldly calculating expression on her mother’s face.

“Did you hit it off?”

Kelly suddenly realized what her mother was asking. “He seemed like a spoiled asshole.”

“That’s what he is, but that wasn’t my question. Did he seem interested in you?”

“Why would he—”

“Because he likes attractive women in their twenties.”

Somehow, Kelly wasn’t surprised she wasn’t the first young woman he’d hit on. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know? You’ve been around the block enough. You’d know if a man was interested.”

Kelly felt a sudden flash of horror, picturing herself coming hard around Caleb’s cock, her skirt hiked up around her hips.

“You screwed him, didn’t you?” her mother asked.

“I didn’t—what—”

There was absolutely nothing Kelly could say.

“Why bother with embarrassment? I know all about your habits. And this actually works perfectly.”

“What works perfectly?”

“You need to get close to him.”

“Close to him? Why?”

“Because we need proof. Some sort of evidence. If there was any other way to get it, I would have found it by now. But there’s not. There’s no way I can get close enough to him to search his home and computers, but you can. You can.”