St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder by authors_sort

him.
    “How did the meeting with Lee Dunstan go?” Caitlin asked. Her tone was upbeat, her smile warm, and her stomach tight with fear.
    “I told you not to worry about a thing, baby. It’s all taken care of. The IRS will be sniffing up someone else’s butt real soon.”
    She managed not to curse out loud. Or scream. Eighteen months ago, the head of the accounting firm Tal used for business and personal record-keeping had been indicted, tried, and sent to jail for fraud, leaving behind a lot of financial wreckage for the IRS to sift through, searching for taxes owed on unreported profits.
    “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, smiling through her clenched teeth.
    She just wished she believed it. But Tal never talked business with her, which left her dangling alone with her vicious fear of being poor again.
    “Would you like to go over the guest list for the post-auction party?” she asked.
    “I’d rather be whipped.”
    Caitlin had been expecting that response. Tal had married her to add a gloss to his home, his entertaining, and his reputation. Because she’d been raised to be a rich man’s wife, she was good at gloss. Since she wasn’t the type to count money that wasn’t in her hand, she’d cut the guest list down to people who could do Tal’s various business interests some good, and to hell with his freeloading shirtsleeve relatives and old acquaintances. He wouldn’t miss them unless someone pointed out their absence.
    The money saved would go to her own hidden bank account, along with everything she’d skimmed from the household account.
    A woman married to an older man had to look out for herself. Though Tal would never admit it, he simply wasn’t as quick as he’d been five years ago. Or even last year.
    “Then I won’t bother you with the details of the party,” Caitlin said, smiling.
    “You need any more money in the household account?”
    “Don’t I always?”
    Tal laughed and pulled a checkbook out of his jeans pocket. “Fifty do it?”
    “Sixty?”
    “Hell, these parties just keep getting more expensive.”
    “And you keep getting more business from them.”
    Tal laughed. “You got me there. Sixty it is.”
    Smiling, he wrote his wife a check for sixty thousand dollars. She was a bargain at twice the price.
    Class couldn’t be bought, but it could be married.

20
    BRECK RANCH
SEPTEMBER 14
1:49 P.M.
    J ill drove up to the old cabin, put on the parking brake of Zach’s truck, and turned off the engine. She was still rather surprised by him. When she’d said that the dirt track leading to the old homestead was hard to find unless you knew what you were looking for, he’d just handed her the keys to his truck.
    Altogether an intriguing man. Unexpected, too. She could tell he liked the way she moved, but he hadn’t even hinted at a pass, much less made one.
    Very intriguing.
    Irritating, too. The longer she was with him, the more the idea of a pass appealed.
    “Home sweet home, such as it is,” she said.
    Zach closed the computer he’d been using. Silently he took in the weathered old cabin backed up against a red sandstone cliff and tucked beneath a massive old cottonwood.
    He whistled softly. “And here I thought I lived with pieces of history.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “When I’m not on a contract for St. Kilda, I collect abandonedindustrial art—old muscle cars of the ’60s and early ’70s—and restore them. Carcheology, as it were, relics of a time before OPEC ruled. But this cabin goes back to a time before internal combustion engines owned the world, a time when seeps of crude oil in Pennsylvania weren’t worth the land they sat on.”
    Jill smiled. “I’d like to have lived then.”
    “You’re one of the few people I’ve ever met who could actually do it.”
    The compliment surprised her. She glanced sideways at Zach. He was looking at the cabin, his light brown eyes like a hawk’s, missing nothing.
    Intriguing, irritating, intelligent. Sexy in a lean,