Well, plus it was obvious because his wife wasn’t dead.
He had been convicted of the murder of someone who was alive. And while there was a whole lot of speculation centered around the fact that the woman never would have run from him in the first place if he hadn’t been dangerous and terrifying, the fact remained that hewasn’ta killer.
So, there was that.
She knew exactly what two of her brothers, Isaiah and Joshua, would say about this meeting. And it would be colorful. Not at all supportive.
But Faith was fascinated by the man who was willing to pay so much to get one of her designs. And maybe her ego was a little bit turbocharged by the whole thing. She couldn’t deny that.
She was only human, after all.
A human who had been working really, really hard to keep on top of her status as a rising star in the architecture world.
She had designed buildings that had changed skylines, and she’d done homes for the rich and the famous.
Levi Tucker was somethingelse. He was infamous.
The self-made millionaire whose whole world had come crashing down when his wife had disappeared more than five years ago. The man who had been tried and convicted of her murder even when there wasn’t a body.
Who had spent the past five years in prison, and who was now digging his way back out...
He wanted her. And yeah, it interested her.
She was getting bored.
Which seemed...ungrateful. Her skill for design had made her famous at a ridiculously young age, but, of course, it was her older brothers and their business acumen that had helped her find success so quickly.
Joshua was a public-relations wizard, Isaiah a genius with finance. Faith, for her part, was the one with the imagination.
The one who saw buildings growing out of the ground like trees and worked to find ways to twist them into new shapes, to draw new lines into the man-made landscape to blend it all together with nature.
She had always been an artist, but her fascination with buildings had come from a trip her family had taken when she was a child. They had driven from Copper Ridge into Portland, Oregon, and she had been struck by the beauty that surrounded the city.
But in the part of the city where they’d stayed, everything was blocky and made of concrete. Of course, there were parts of the city that were lovely, with architecture that was ornate and classic, but there were parts where the buildings had been stacked in light gray rectangles, and it had nearly wounded her to see the mountains obscured by such unimaginative, dull shapes.
When she had gotten back to their hotel room, she had begun to draw, trying to find a way to blend function and form with the natural beauty that already existed.
It had become an obsession.
It was tough to be an obsessed person. Someone who lived in their own head, in their dreams and fantasies.
It made it difficult to relate to people.
Fortunately, she had found a good friend, Mia, who had been completely understanding of Faith and her particular idiosyncrasies.
Now Mia was her sister-in-law, because she had married Faith’s oldest brother, something Faith really hadn’t seen coming.
Devlin was just...so much older. There was more than ten years between him and Faith, and she’d had no idea her friend felt that way about him.
She was happy for both of them, of course.
But their bond sometimes made her feel isolated. The fact that her friend now had thisthingthat Faith herself never had. And that thisthingwas with Faith’s brother. Of all people.
Even Joshua and Isaiah had fallen in love and gotten married.
Joshua had wed a woman he had met while trying to get revenge on their father for attempting to force him into marriage, while Isaiah married his personal assistant.
Maybe it was her family that had driven Faith to the top of the mountain today.
