Once Upon A Friendship

He shrugged. Grinned. “Pretty much.” And then he added, “Last week I really pissed him off.”

“I have been privy to the private details of Liam’s dealings with his father for more than a decade,” Gabrielle said, needing these two powerful people to understand that Liam was not one of their suspects. “He insisted that Liam work in the family business and then kept him doing menial jobs. He promoted him to the top floor so that he had the status to appear at social functions as a Connelly, but paid him less than middle department managers. Liam has degrees in journalism and finance, and wanted to seriously pursue his writing. Mr. Connelly sent a piece Liam had done to a friend of his in the business and gave it back completely slashed up. He told Liam that it was time he faced the truth and grew up. That’s when he moved him to the top floor.”

“It’s okay, Gabi.” Liam’s smile was turned on her. And she was so shocked she fell silent. He must have meant that look for Gwen Menard. Liam never, ever gave her or Marie that look. He smiled at them, of course. Laughed at them, or with them, mostly. But that warm look, the way-a-man-looks-at-a-woman look—never. “I didn’t take the editor’s criticisms to heart. I knew he’d probably paid the guy to fill my article with red ink. And I didn’t stop writing.”

He turned to the agents. “I have a couple of mother hens who look out for me.”

“He took away Liam’s car our freshman year of college just because Liam wanted to live in a dorm, forcing him to take a bus from Boulder to Denver five nights a week to work, and then demoted him from mail room clerk to night janitor.” Gabrielle wanted these people to know that Liam’s father was over-the-top mean.

To the point of abusive.

“One Christmas, when Liam wanted to have dinner here with Marie and me, Walter forbade it. He gave Liam ten thousand dollars’ worth of gifts that year, and then when Liam came to dinner anyway, he took every one of them back. He was also the only Connelly employee that year who didn’t receive a bonus.”

“It was an expensive dinner,” Liam said with a smile. “But worth every bite.”

Liam might not want others to know about his father’s tactics. She understood that he was embarrassed, even humiliated. But these were federal officials. They hadn’t just come around to chat. “Anyway, Liam went into partnership with Marie and me—you can check us out, Threefold, we formed an LLC—to buy this building. We closed last week. Liam didn’t tell his father about the deal, but Mr. Connelly found out just before we closed. He confronted Liam. Liam closed on the deal anyway...”

She might not have Liam’s testimony or proof of the exact facts, but the truth was clear to anyone who’d been Liam Connelly’s friend during the twelve years he’d been on the road to being his own man while still tending to familial responsibility.

Menard turned to Liam, her big brown eyes softening even more. “So you’re saying that your father disowned you for purchasing this building?”

“I believe his exact words were, ‘We cannot be a team, you and I. I can no longer trust you.’”

Gabrielle’s breath caught in her throat.

“He can no longer trust you?” Agent Howard’s investigative manner wasn’t softening at all. “For buying an old building?”

“For using money he and my late mother put in a trust for me without telling him. He claims that I was duplicitous in that I deliberately hid from him an investment of ‘family’ money.”

“This guy sounds like a real...” Gwen Menard stopped herself.

But the agents had a few pieces of information to impart before they left.

The FBI was seeking charges against Walter Connelly, for running a Ponzi scheme and money laundering. They were accusing him of defrauding clients out of millions of dollars. He’d taken their money, telling them he was investing it in the Grayson Communities, after he’d already sold the development. He’d used a small portion of that new money to purchase land that he’d billed as phase two of Grayson but that had, in fact, been swampland. He’d continued to take investments and then used the newer monies gained to pay dividends to earlier investors. The rest of the money had been deposited into legitimate businesses but then spent to buy things that did not exist anywhere except on paper. In reality the money had been given back to Walter, who could spend it at will without any way for it to be traced.

Any Connelly assets that were part of the investigation had been frozen.

Walter Connelly was under arrest.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_b6e46fcc-b677-5dd2-a157-cbe3a9ae1404)

LIAM WASN’T GOING to panic.

“If I’m somehow going to be implicated, I’m going to cooperate fully,” he said to Gabi, who was sitting in the passenger seat of his BMW an hour and a half after she’d burst into his apartment. They were on their way to FBI headquarters, where his father was being held for questioning before being booked into a city holding cell.

If Agents Menard and Howard had thought they were going to get a reaction out of him by informing him that he no longer had access to any of his father’s assets—as if his reaction to the news was somehow going to trap him in his supposed lies—they must have been disappointed.

They were a week late on that blow. He’d already lost everything. Knowing that some of Connelly’s assets were frozen didn’t change his day a bit.

“Did you call George?” Gabi’s question kept him focused—unlike the horror on Marie’s face when they’d let her know what was going on. He’d felt a stab of fear then.

But he was a man, in spite of his father treating him like the stupid kid he might once have been. He’d handle this.

“I called him,” he said. “While you were out front getting Marie.” They’d told her the news in the coffee shop’s back office. “He wasn’t in his office and didn’t answer his cell. I left messages both places.”

“Chances are he’s with your father.”

He agreed. Which made him more eager than ever to get where they were going. Ten miles had never seemed so far.

“Did your father really cut you out of his will?”

Did he detect a note of hurt in her voice? Liam glanced in her direction. Gabi was watching the traffic. Of course. She was always on the lookout for the dangers ahead.

“Yes.”

“Last week?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” The bite in her tone bothered him. He’d hurt her. As usual, he’d been thinking about his own life.

“It had nothing to do with you or Marie, so my not telling you—”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. And I should have known that. I’m... I didn’t like the way I saw myself in your eyes.” They were stopped at a light and he glanced over at her. “Like I’m some kid whose daddy abuses him and he just keeps going back for more.” It was humiliating. And worse.

Her gaze softened. “You might have wanted to check your vision against ours,” she said. The small smile on her lips had him looking back at the road. Staring at it.

He’d...felt...something. From Gabi. His Gabi. The feeling hadn’t been sister-like.

And that was not only humiliating. It was horrible.

“You’re way stronger than you know, Liam,” she said, as the light changed and he started forward. “I see a man who puts up with his father’s abuse while still managing to claim an identity in his own small ways, because you know he has no one and relies on you. You subjugate your own desires for his, but because you think it’s the right thing to do, to be responsible, not because you fear what he can do to you.”

Her vision was definitely different from his. But it wouldn’t be forever. He was working on becoming the man she seemed to think he was.

“What about this car? He didn’t take it.”

“I paid it off last year, but even so, the old man kindly informed me that I was welcome to keep it.”

“He didn’t know you’d paid it off?”

“Are you kidding? Nothing happens without him knowing about it. He knew we’d closed on the building before I drove from the closing back to the office. His car remark was just to get a rise out of me.”

He waited for her to ask if it had. Any other time she would have.

But he hadn’t run to her this time. He’d shut her out.