Hearing the name of his former admin was like finding a missing piece to an old mental puzzle. “Lauren,” he said.
“Yes. What about her?”
“What else did she tell you about me and my tastes?”
Tori paused for a second and turned to look at him. “You don’t think…?”
“She made it all up,” he said with certainty. Something about Tori’s ethics violation had always troubled him, but he could never put his finger on what, aside from him not wanting to believe she could do it. There had been a real connection between them. That was probably why the idea of her with another man was more painful than it should’ve been. “Lauren is the one who told me she saw you having an intimate dinner with one of our suppliers. The next day you started making recommendations… The timing was too suspicious.”
“He had a superior product. He didn’t have to seduce me for an endorsement. But why would she say that about me when it wasn’t true?”
With that piece in place, the entire picture became painfully clear. “I am so sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “This was all my fault.”
“How? If Lauren did it, why are you to blame?”
Wade had ended up firing Lauren only a few months after Tori. She’d seemed sweet at first. After Tori left, she developed some extremely suggestive behaviors. She made it no secret she wanted Wade, although he wasn’t interested at all. After catching her being rude on the phone to Julianne, thinking she was a girlfriend and not his sister, he had to let her go. She was an efficient employee, but she was letting a misplaced territoriality compromise her performance.
“She must’ve been jealous of you. I don’t know why I didn’t connect this before. I asked her one afternoon if she could help me find out what kind of flowers you liked. I was going to send some to your home and ask if you’d like to have dinner.”
“I never got any flowers,” Tori replied.
“I never got to send them. Lauren showed up with her story about you the next day. It never occurred to me that she was jealous enough of you to sabotage your whole career like that, but that has to be it. Not long after you left, Lauren made it quite obvious that she was interested in me. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
Tori nodded and glanced down at the remains of her breakfast. “There was no way to prove it either way. You did what you had to do.”
“I feel horrible. I want to make it up to you somehow.”
“That’s not necessary,” she said. “I know I’ve given you a lot of grief over it, but look at where I am now. It might have been a rocky transition, but things turned out the way they were meant to. If I had continued to work for you, I’d probably still be there, making you money, but I never would’ve gone for my dream. When I lost my job, I took the chance to start my own company, and it was the best thing I could’ve done. When I think of it that way, I don’t know…maybe I should be thanking you.”
“Yet you’ve been angry with me all this time?”
“I was hurt because you didn’t believe me. It was easy to blame you for the upheaval in my life that came after it. The truth is probably that I wasn’t ready to settle down in one place yet. I was just rebelling from my parents. Who knows, if you hadn’t fired me, I might’ve quit a few weeks later and started wandering again.”
“What made you ready to settle down now? Here?”
“I started doing genealogy a few years back as a way to connect with my roots. My parents were so nomadic I never really met any extended family or knew where we came from. A little digging uncovered that my father’s family was from this area, a few generations back. Cornwall was where they settled after migrating to America from Ireland.”
She took a sip of juice before continuing. “I came up here on a whim once, when I had a free weekend away from the project in Philadelphia. I just drove around, mostly. But then I spied this beautiful wooded area and I pulled over and started walking around. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was home. Like I’d spiritually dropped anchor. I wanted to stay here. So I started looking for land to buy. I couldn’t have found a more perfect piece of property than the one your parents were offering. I snatched it up and started hatching plans to build my dream house.”
Seeing the excitement light up Tori’s face, Wade felt smacked in the gut with guilt. She longed for a connection to her family and a chance to build a real home. And he wanted her to. He felt crappy for keeping her from that dream. But he couldn’t risk the body being found, even for her dreams. “And once again, I’ve charged into your life and tried to ruin it all.”