The Socialite and the Bodyguard by Dana Marton Page A

that you were in danger and smart enough to keep up the clueless socialite act so whoever went after your parents and Lance wouldn’t know that you had a clue, wouldn’t come after you.” He’d figured that out at one point in the last twenty-four hours.
    She pulled up her legs and rested her arms on her knees. Her short skirt slid up to reveal enough of her creamy thighs to make him swallow hard.
    For a second he considered whether she was doing it on purpose, to distract him. But she seemed completely unaware of the hunger that had been building in him, her face guileless.
    “But he did come after me,” she said.
    “So you slipped up somewhere. Were you still pushing a police investigation?”
    “Gave that up. Figured out that they were never going to believe me and if I kept insisting, I’d place myself in the killer’s crosshairs.” “But you talked to someone about it.” Now that he knew her better, he didn’t think she was the kind who could give up something like this. She was too loyal for that. She would want to know what had happened to her older brother and her parents.
    “I told my uncle so he could keep an eye out.” Her expression changed. She closed her eyes while she drew a long breath. Then looked at him with hesitation in her gaze. “Okay, I haven’t told you everything.”
    He tamped back his annoyance. She trusted everyone around her except him, the one person who could keep her safe. How messed up was that? “I’m listening.”
    “I might have something to do with—I might be the reason why my parents and Lance died.” She pressed her lips together, a pained expression on her face, misery sitting in her blue eyes. “When my father hired me, he gave me a low-level job in finance.” She paused as if still undecided about how much to say.
    “We’re on the same team here,” he reminded her.
    “I found a bunch of old travel-expense reports in a drawer and they weren’t stamped. So I wanted to make sure they’d been claimed by the tax coordinators on the other side of the finance department.”
    “And?”
    “They didn’t have time to bother with what they thought was a negligible amount. To keep me busy and off their backs, one gave me access to the system so I could check it out for myself.”
    “You found that money was missing somewhere.”
    Her azure eyes went wide. “How did you know that?”
    “Money and murder go hand in hand. How much?” “A little over a million dollars.”
    “And nobody noticed?”
    “It was taken in small amounts, disguised as travel expenses and on-the-spot employee bonuses. We give those out for good work throughout the year.”
    “You took that information to your father.” A picture was beginning to gel in his brain.
    She looked at her feet. “He was going to look into it. He and my mom were in a car accident two weeks later.”
    “What did you do next?”
    “I didn’t connect the dots at first. I was so devastated by the accident. Months passed before I thought of the missing money again. I told everything to Lance.”
    “Then he died.”
    She nodded. “I talked to the police, but the deaths were all ruled accidents. Half the time they thought I was loopy from grief, the other half they were accusing me of wanting more media attention.”
    His jaw tightened. “But you told your uncle, too, and nothing happened to him.”
    “He didn’t believe me. My father did—he was going to investigate the company records. So was Lance. My uncle is too trusting. He thought I just needed some rest.”
    “How long ago did you talk to him?”
    “Almost a year.”
    “And you haven’t brought it up since?”
    “Once I figured out that looking into the missing money might have led to the accidents, I didn’t dare.”
    Her uncle might not have taken her murder theory seriously, but he cared enough to talk her into getting an extra guard when Tsini had been threatened. And he’d been smart enough to recommend Welkins’s group. “Your uncle