Caitlin's Choice by Kat Attalla Page B

I’m wrong. Tyler’s father is the same man you once referred to as the stealth bomber, right?”
    Caitlin felt the blood rise to her cheeks and she lowered her head. Comes in under the cover of darkness, drops its bomb and disappears, leaving a mass of destruction in its wake. Yep, she’d said that.
    Marc knew her too well to be fooled by her feeble story. “What’s he got on you, Caitlin?”
    She averted her gaze. Thinking about the past, remembering all she had lost, only rubbed salt into a wound that had never healed. She wanted to let go of the hurt and the anger, but she didn’t know how.
    “Talk to me,” Marc said in a soft, encouraging voice. “I might be able to help you.”
    “You can’t.” Her words came out in a whisper of regret.
    “Let me be the judge.”
    Marc had done a lot for her, more than an employee deserved from a boss. She owed him some kind of explanation. Taking a deep breath for courage, she met his questioning stare.  “Andrew was going to take me to court for custody. That was his idea of a compromise.”
    Marc waved his hand in the air as if the idea were absurd. “The most risqué thing you’ve ever done was lingerie spread for Sears. What could you possibly be afraid of?”
    “I guess that really depends on how far back he’s willing to dig.”
    He came around to the front of the desk and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “You make it sound as if you were a teenage Ma Barker or something.”
    She shrugged. “If you ask my father, he’d probably tell you I was worse.”
    “What did you do?”
    Caitlin blinked. “That’s the sad part. I didn’t do anything, except get mixed up with the wrong man at the wrong time. When I won that fashion contest, my father was adamantly opposed to the idea of my leaving. He had a husband all picked out for me. I figured the best way out of the situation was to make sure the guy didn’t want to marry me.”
    “Hardly the crime of the century,” Marc said.
    “There was a new guy in town. An investment broker who was hired by the local bank, fresh from Wall Street with marvelous plans for the town of Weldon. Quinton, my supposed fiancé, touted him all over town as the next Donald Trump. He filled the townsfolk’s heads with delusions of grandeur. With just a few thousand dollars invested, they would be millionaires overnight.”
    Caitlin paused for a breath. “When he asked me on a date, I said yes. He was a conceited bore and downright crude for a supposedly educated man, but I kept seeing him because word got around fast. I figured if Quinton wasn’t interested in me any longer, my father would relent and let me study in New York.”
    Marc tapped his finger against the tip of her nose.  “I still don’t see what crime you committed. Andrew Sinclair could hardly take you to court for dating a moron when you were eighteen.”
    If only that man had been a moron. He was a cunning fox who had outsmarted the greedy hounds, and, like hounds, the people wanted blood.
    “You have to understand the mountain mentality. To most people a couple thousand is a life’s savings. Here comes this apparently wealthy man promising the people they will be living the life they see on television if they trust him with their money, and trust him they did—all except my father. There’s a saying that you can’t cheat an honest man, and my father was honest to a fault.
    “I was so caught up in my own dreams that I didn’t see what was going on around me. When I got nowhere trying to reason with my father, I just decided to pack my bag and leave. The same night, Mr. Wall Street skipped out with the life’s savings of half the town.”
    A flash of understanding crossed his face. “Let me guess. They thought you were involved in the scam?”
    “Involved? They figured I had planned it with the guy. They needed someone to blame, rather than admit a smooth-talking stranger had conned them out of their money without help, especially since my