“Furthermore, the fact that you not only carefully planned but repeated the offense on numerous occasions over a twelve-month period shows a forethought and awareness of what you were doing that, in my view, compounds the situation.”
Fuck, thought Milly. This doesn’t sound good.
The judge went on. “On the other hand, and in mitigation, I am convinced that the physical violence and reprisals that you suffered at the hands of Mr. Dhaktoub’s associates, and your fear of further such reprisals, played a large part in your decision to carry on with a scheme which you might have otherwise wished to abandon.”
On the other side of the court the Arab contingent shook their heads bitterly, but Milly was too busy watching J. to notice. Despite all the bad blood there’d been between them, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him today.
“Taking all this into consideration, as well as the fact that you sensibly decided to plead guilty to both charges, I have decided to impose a custodial sentence of six months, with parole eligibility at no less than three months.”
The hammer came down with a very final thud and Zac spun around and grinned at Milly, who smiled back. Six months was a great result, better than any of them had realistically expected. If he made parole he might even be home in time for Christmas. Even Jasper looked visibly relieved, giving a tentative wave to Linda before he was led back down to the cells.
“Six months?” Linda turned an anguished face to Milly. “That seems an awfully long time for such a silly mistake. How’s he going to survive in there for six whole months?”
“Oh, Mummy.” Milly frowned. “He’s been very, very lucky, thanks to Zac. He could have gotten far longer. Anyway, he’ll probably only serve three. That’s twelve weeks. That’s nothing.”
“Will they let us see him?” Linda asked Zac, who was unable to wipe the grin off his face as he came over to join them. He was happy with the result, of course, but happier still to see Milly looking foxier than ever in the sexy forties-style suit she’d worn for court.
“They should,” he said kindly. He could see Linda was on the brink of tears. This whole thing had been a nightmare for her. “If you come with me now, they normally give them ten minutes or so with their barristers before they whisk them off.”
Waving his pass at the duty officers, he ushered them through a back door leading to the interview rooms and cells. But at the last minute, Milly hung back.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I think Mummy’d rather see him alone.”
“Fair enough.” Zac smiled. She wasn’t just sexy, she was nice too—which was more than could be said for her brother. Jasper’s unique combination of blind arrogance and craven cowardice had not endeared him as a client.
“Here,” he said, scribbling something on a piece of paper and handing it to her.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a secret code to a Masonic lodge in Cambridge,” he said, deadpan. Then, when she didn’t laugh, “Of course it’s not, you idiot. It’s my number, isn’t it?”
She opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off.
“If you don’t want to call, you don’t have to,” he said. “I won’t be offended. But you look like you could do with some feeding up.”
“Thanks a lot!” said Milly.
“So I thought I’d offer you some dinner. Think about it.”
But before she had a chance to think about it, he was gone, pushing Linda ahead as the heavy oak courtroom door swung noisily shut behind them.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The run-up to Christmas was definitely not the season to be jolly as far as Todd Cranborn was concerned.
He’d thought Milly was high maintenance. But compared to Candy Price, he now realized, she was simplicity itself. Her daily tantrums, astronomical personal expenditure, and vanity on a scale that surely bordered on the megalomaniacal—all of these he could have stood if it weren’t for the rest of her baggage. Namely, Chase and Chance, who clearly hated him almost as much as he loathed them, and Jimmy.
He’d expected some retribution from Price, of course. Everyone knew that Jimmy was not a man to be crossed lightly, and betrayals didn’t come much deeper than waltzing off into the sunset with the guy’s wife. But Todd thought, he really truly believed when he began the affair, that eventually it would all blow over. That Jimmy would come to terms with it, give Candy her lousy divorce, and move on to the next model.
What he hadn’t understood, of course, was that Jimmy’s love for Candy was not only real, it was total, all-encompassing, and deeply, deeply obsessive. The fact that the girl had made her choice meant nothing to him. If he couldn’t have her, he intended to make damn sure that no one else could either. He wanted Todd not only punished but eviscerated and, if at all possible, torn limb from limb for having stolen her away from him in the first place.
His first move had been to pull out of their Orlando real estate projects. So far, so predictable. But then he’d begun a systematic and frighteningly effective attack on all Todd’s other businesses. Not only had he reignited the court case at Highwood, hiring some hotshot lawyer to get a string of delaying injunctions against Comarco long enough to keep them from drilling for three long, expensive months. But he started calling in favors elsewhere too. Soon deal after deal started collapsing around Todd’s ears in places as far apart as New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco, as former partners and colleagues deserted him like rats on a sinking ship. Clearly, Todd had underestimated the clout a man like Jimmy wielded in the most surprising and disparate of circles.
Before long he found himself vulnerable and overextended on a whole raft of ventures. Just when he’d landed himself the most demanding woman on the planet to support (Candy, apparently, expected first-class service in everything, from material comforts to sexual performance. If he didn’t fuck her at least twice a day, and improve her orgasm each time, she became unbearably moody. How on earth Jimmy had managed to run a multimillion-dollar company and keep up his racing interests while married to her was a complete fucking mystery), he was, for the first time since his early twenties, financially stretched.
Despite everything, though, Todd still found himself attracted to Candy in a way he’d never been with any other woman. The thought that she might up and leave him once her divorce money came through kept him awake at night even more than Jimmy’s escalating personal vendetta. So when she’d demanded he take her and the kids away to Telluride for two weeks’ skiing at Christmas, he’d given in.
But as the vacation drew nearer, he realized there was no way in hell he could afford to take fourteen days off. Sooner or later he was gonna have to bite the bullet and tell her majesty that a long weekend was the most he could swing.
He was pondering just how he might do this one Sunday afternoon in early December, when he was interrupted by a tentative knock at the door.
“If it isn’t world war three,” he said, as Sally, the latest exhausted drudge employed as the boys’ nanny, stuck her head around the door, “I don’t want to know about it.”
Candy was out—shopping, as usual—and the kids, mercy of mercies, were asleep, no doubt recharging for another six hours of solid screeching before bed. Todd ought to be working. But after the marathon Candy had put him through in bed this morning (Three erections in an hour, for God’s sake. What was he, nineteen?) he was way too shattered even to think about it.
“I’m reeeeally sorry,” said the girl nervously, “but I do think you ought to come. It’s the police.”
“The police?” Frowning, he got to his feet and pushed past her into the hallway. “LAPD you mean? What the hell do those guys want?”
But the three black-suited men huddled just inside the front door were not LAPD. If anything they looked more like FBI.
“Are you Todd Cranborn?” asked the man in front, pulling out a nondescript badge from his inside jacket pocket and flashing it at him so quickly it could have been
anything.
“You know I am,” snapped Todd. “You’re standing in my house, Columbo. The question is, who are you?”
The confrontational approach was a mistake. At a nod from their boss, the other two suits glided forward, each taking one of Todd’s arms and pinning them quite painfully behind his back before snapping on a pair of cuffs.
“What the hell . . .” he spluttered. “This is outrageous.”
“I’m arresting you on suspicion of fraud,” said the first man. “Tax fraud, to be more precise. You have the right to remain silent—”
“Screw you,” said Todd. “You better believe I’m not remaining silent! This is bullshit. I don’t know anything about any fraud. I pay my goddamn taxes.”
“It appears the IRS disagrees with you about that,” said his tormentor, nonchalantly examining his cuticles while Todd’s blood pressure shot past high toward lethal. “They have information, which has been passed along to us, about what I can only describe as repeated and systematic attempts to defraud the State of California of rightful property and other taxes.”
Fucking Jimmy. He’d gone too far this time. Sure, Todd sailed pretty close to the wind on some of his real estate deals. But he was nothing if not meticulous when it came to his legal position. His accountants might be creative, but they weren’t criminal. At least, he didn’t think they were.
“You are so far out of your depth with this,” he hissed, as they bundled him out of the house and into their waiting, unmarked SUV, just as Candy’s pink Porsche swung back through the gates. “I’m gonna have your ass on a plate, you just see if I don’t.”
“Todd?” Sashaying across the cobbles in sky-high Jimmy Choo crocodile boots and a black leather miniskirt that left nothing whatsoever to the imagination, Candy cut such an arresting figure that for a moment the FBI men were thrown off stride. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing for you to worry about, baby,” he assured her. “Just get on the phone to Jack Green, would you, my lawyer. His name’s in the brown address book on my desk. Tell him I need him right away.”
He did his best to sound confident, but inside his mind was racing.
What did Jimmy have on him? What the hell had the son of a bitch managed to dig up now?
Rather to her surprise, Milly thoroughly enjoyed the run-up to Christmas. And Zac Spiro had a lot to do with it.
It began with him dropping by the town house with spurious excuses: like claiming to have some information on Jasper’s parole date (that he could perfectly easily have delivered by phone or e-mail) or that he thought he might have accidentally overcharged Linda on the VAT for his fees (he hadn’t). But the real reason for his visits was so obvious that eventually he was forced to declare it, asking Milly out for a dinner date in Ely one weekend.
Her first instinct had been to say no. To shut him down before things got out of hand and she started—heaven forbid—reciprocating his feelings. Amazingly, it was Linda who talked her out of it.
“Oh, darling,” she said, glancing up from the vast saucepan of blackberry jam she was making. “It’s only dinner, for goodness’ sake. Do give the poor boy a chance. It’ll do you good to get out, meet some new chaps.”
She was right, too. It did do Milly good.
Zac was utterly hilarious throughout dinner, making her laugh in a totally abandoned, carefree way she’d almost forgotten she was capable of. When he dropped her home, happily drunk, a few hours later, he walked her up to the front door and she let him kiss her.
It was a nice kiss. Not earth-shattering. Not a knee-weakening harbinger of lust. But a pleasant, gentle, satisfying sensation. She liked it.
That first kiss had set the tone for the relationship that followed. After the emotional roller-coaster ride of the last year, Milly was quite happy to take contentment over ecstasy, and that was exactly what Zac provided. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to him—he was handsome enough and, although she only had Todd to compare him to, seemed to be a perfectly skillful and adept lover—it was just that sex was the smallest part of what drew her to him. His friendship, his humor, his intelligence and good advice, were all more-important parts of the package. And if that meant sacrificing passion—the same passion that had caused her such heartache and misery over Bobby and had blinded her to reality with Todd for so long—well, she reckoned that was a price worth paying.
For his part, Zac was smart and instinctive enough to sense her reticence. He was very careful not to push her farther than she wanted to go or ask for more commitment than she felt ready to give. He had enough good sense to take things slow, easing his way into her life and her family almost by osmosis.
But Zac wasn’t the only change for the better on the home front. With the stress of the trial over, Linda began to get back to her old self. Or rather, to a slightly softer, less-overbearing version of it. Gone were the worst excesses of her crippling social insecurity. Even she had to face the fact that with one child in Playboy and the other in prison, she was no longer in much of a position to cast aspersions on other people’s propriety. But her inner snob, though subdued, certainly wasn’t dead.
“What were you thinking of wearing, darling?” she’d asked Milly a few weeks ago, when she’d arrived home after a long day at the stables with Radar and Stanley, another of Cecil’s old guard she’d managed to track down and rescue.
“Wearing?” Helping herself to a mug of mulled wine from the steaming saucepan on the Aga, Milly eased herself down into the kitchen armchair, a much-loved reminder of Newells. “To what?”
“The Delaneys’ Christmas Eve drinks party, of course,” said Linda. “We’ll have to get you something new.”
“You are kidding,” Milly said, choking on her drink. “After everything Rachel’s put us through? You still want to go?”
“It’s not a question of wanting to go,” said Linda with all the solemn earnestness of someone who clearly did, desperately, want to go. “It’s about being polite.”
True, Rachel had behaved disgracefully. The way she’d abandoned poor Jasper in his hour of need was what had finally brought Linda around to Milly’s way of thinking: The girl was a nasty piece of work. But it would take more than that to keep Linda Lockwood Groves away from Mittlingsford’s answer to Elton John’s White Tie and Tiaras Ball. After all, it wasn’t poor Michael and Julia’s fault that their daughter had turned out to be a faithless slut, was it? Whatever Rachel may have done, her parents remained linchpins of Newmarket society. The Delaneys were not a family to be scratched out of one’s leather-bound Smythson’s address book lightly.
At first Milly had refused point-blank to even consider it. But Zac made her change her mind.
“Oh, come on, it’ll be fun,” he said. He was helping her muck out Stanley’s filthy straw a few days after Linda received the invitation.
They’d been going out for over a month by then, so he was used to spending time around her horses. But somehow he still managed to look as out of place in a stable as a black man at a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
“You can laugh at how fat Rachel’s gotten,” he said, turning over the fresh hay with a pitchfork, “and I can enjoy all the other blokes staring at me and wishing their birds were Playmates.”
“I was not a bloody Playmate!” said Milly, flinging a lump of dung-encrusted straw in his general direction. “I was a quarter horse jockey, okay?”
“A quarter horse jockey who got her kit off,” Zac teased her.
Milly pretended to look cross, but secretly she loved the way he was so cool about her pictures and all those awful, cringe-making cowgirl ads she’d done in the States. After her mother’s pained hand-wringing, it was lovely to be able to laugh about it with someone.
“Please let’s go,” he insisted. “The Delaneys’ house is supposed to be stunning. Besides, your mother’s outfit alone is bound to make it worth the trip. You know it, really.”
Needless to say, Linda was overjoyed by Milly’s change of heart and thrilled with Zac fo
r persuading her, showing her appreciation in the time-honored manner of baking him an enormous batch of homemade biscuits.
“Are you quite sure you’re not Jewish, Mrs. LG?” he asked, as she stood over him proudly, watching him eat until he thought his stomach might explode, Mr. Creosote-like, all over the table.
“Shush, dear,” she said indulgently. “Eat your biscuits.”
Given the fact he had never been to Eton, hadn’t a landed estate to his name, and had actually grown up in Golders Green, it was odd that Linda should have such a soft spot for Zac. But for whatever reason, she did. She was forever pushing Milly to “take things to the next stage” with him. Whatever that meant.
Unfortunately, when Christmas Eve finally dawned, everyone at the town house woke up with the sort of hangover that could stop a train.
Two days ago they’d gotten word that Jasper was to be released early for good behavior. He would therefore be home in time for Christmas—and the Delaney party, if he chose to go to it. After much hysterical crying and hand flapping from Linda, it was decided that Zac and Milly would go and collect him from the prison gates, thus sparing her the humiliation of being photographed in such insalubrious surroundings by local reporters. Linda would stay home preparing Jasper’s welcome-home meal and putting the finishing touches to her Christmas decorations.
After the initial awkwardness of seeing one another again—an awkwardness intensified by the fact that Jasper appeared to have “found God” in prison and would insist on banging on about the peace of Christ to anyone who would listen—the four of them took the sensible option of getting incoherently drunk as soon as possible.
Hence the green, sheepish faces around the breakfast table in the morning.
“I know I said I’d go, Mummy,” rasped Milly, her voice like sandpaper. “But I really can’t face it. Can’t you tell Sir Michael I’m ill?”