Footsteps sounded, coming down the hall. A light rap, and Beau looked up to see Cassidy in the open bedroom doorway. “I knocked on the kitchen door but no one answered. It was open so I came on in.”
He rose from his chair and walked toward her. “I told Flo to go on home, take a few days off. This can’t be easy on her.”
“Are you going to let her go?” She spotted the laptop, sitting open and turned on, and wandered farther into the room.
Beau forced himself not to glance at the bed. “Flo waswith my father for fifteen years, so no. I’ll find something for her to do.”
Cassidy smiled and he felt it like an electric shock to his system.
“I’m glad,” she said, showing a soft side he found extremely attractive. Hell, there were a lot of things about the lady detective he found damned attractive.
“I found something in one of those manila files we took out of your father’s study.” She walked past him to the computer, and he managed to look beyond the sexy, dark blue skinny jeans and blue knit top to the manila folder tucked under her arm.
“What is it?”
She leaned over the desk to set it down. When she turned, he caught a glimpse of soft pale cleavage above a white lace bra and stifled a groan. Jesus, he never should have hired her.Distractionwasn’t a strong enough word.
She flipped open the folder. “This is the file on the sale of Green Gables Realty.”
“George Larson. He was one of the names my father gave you.”
“That’s right, the senator’s partner in the business. There’s something else in the file—a copy of a deed to a building in Iron Springs. It’s from the buyer of Green Gables, granting title to your father. The thing is, the deed wasn’t recorded until a month after the sale closed. I hate to say it, Beau, but I think your father took the building as payment on the side. It wasn’t in the escrow, so he wouldn’t have to divide the money with his partner when he sold it.”
Beau wasn’t surprised. He’d been suspicious of his father’s shady dealings half his life.
She pulled out another document. “This is a deed showing the sale of the Iron Springs building to a man named Robert Durant. I think your father sold it to him and took the money for himself.”
Beau leaned over to study the documents, trying to ignore the faint scent of gardenias that reminded him of their wrestling match in the hall.
He checked the dates and location of the property, glanced up. “He basically had no conscience, Cassidy. I warned you of that from the start.”
“Maybe he needed money.”
Beau opened his mouth to argue, then paused. “I guess it’s possible. We always had money when I was a kid. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to wonder where he was getting it. I started snooping through his papers, sneaking down the hall to eavesdrop on the late-night meetings going on in his study. It didn’t take long to figure out a lot of what he was doing wasn’t strictly on the up-and-up. It was just one more reason for me to get the hell out.”
She put the document back in the file. “Maybe Larson found out he’d been cheated. Maybe they fought about it, Larson lost his temper and killed him.”
Beau knew George Larson, who seemed a little too easygoing to stab a man in the heart. But money had a way of bringing out the worst in people. “We need to talk to him, find out if he has an alibi for the time of the murder.”
“Why don’t we give the information to Detective Briscoe? Let him talk to Larson.”
Beau sighed. “Because in a couple of weeks, my father is going to have a daughter. Pleasant Hill is a small town. Eventually everyone will know the senator was her dad. I don’t want her growing up with the whole town gossiping behind her back about the kind of man he was.”
“It might come out anyway, Beau.”
“If it happens, we’ll deal with it. First let’s find out where Larson was the day of the murder.”
“Do you know where we can find him?”
“I know where he lives.” He flicked her a glance. “You want to go for a ride?”
For an instant, something flashed in those sexy green eyes, as if she’d had the same lustful thought he’d had earlier. His blood surged, began to head south.
“I’m ready when you are,” she said, sending another hot rush through him.
“Okay . . . let’s go.” Beau clamped down on his inappropriate thoughts and urged Cassidy out of the room. He pulled his car keys out of his pocket as they walked through the house toward the door in the kitchen leading into the garage.
Cassidy grinned and snagged the keys from his hand. “How about letting me drive? I’ve never driven a Ferrari.”
