Betrayal - Fern Michaels [112]
Coleman grinned. “I hope to hell I never piss you off.”
“So, tell me what a horrible monster I am.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not going to say what you’re doing is right, but I will say I can understand why you’re doing it. Revenge is sweet, especially when you can choose the method by which it’s delivered. I wouldn’t want you to get caught, Kate. Some of these acts are federal. Bank tampering, for instance. I suppose you were aware of this from the beginning?”
“I was. And I didn’t care if I got caught. That was what enabled me to continue with my plan. I didn’t have a life without Alex. It didn’t matter if I spent the remainder of my life a free woman on the outside or inside a jail cell.”
“And what’s changed about that now?” Coleman asked.
“I want to live again. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life behind bars. Alex wouldn’t have wanted to see me end up this way.”
“No, he wouldn’t. I assume you’re going to tell me that you have something else in mind?”
“Sort of. I haven’t worked out all the details. It’s my hope that when all is said and done, Alex’s death will be avenged and the Winter family will suffer, but in another way. That’s the part I haven’t quite worked out yet. So that’s why you couldn’t find me the past five years. I didn’t need any distractions in my life. If I was to ruin the Winters, I had to concentrate on that and nothing else. There wasn’t room in my life for anyone else.”
“Are you telling me you have room in your life for someone now?” Coleman asked.
“I would like to try and make room for someone, Coleman. That’s all I can promise at this point.” Kate couldn’t commit to anything more.
“Seems fair to me. Now that you’ve cleared up the past five years, tell me what can I do now to help you . . . move things forward?”
Kate was dumbfounded. Coleman wanted to help her?
“You’d be willing to . . . This is illegal. You just told me so. I can’t ask you to break the law. Hell, you’re an attorney.”
“I know. I won’t break the law, Kate. But there are ways between the cracks.”
“I never had any intention of keeping all that money. After I read Alex’s letter, I think I’ve been given a bargaining tool.”
“Want to explain?” Coleman quizzed.
Kate had spent most of the night reworking her plot. It wasn’t foolproof, but it wasn’t illegal either. She explained her plan to Coleman.
“You’ve an excellent mind. You would’ve made a powerful opponent in a courtroom. So, when do we get started?”
“I say there is no time like the present.”
Kate and Coleman spent the afternoon making plans. If all turned out well, she would walk away from this a free woman. First, she had a lot of hacking to do.
Debbie couldn’t concentrate on the contract she’d been reading for the past hour. Her world was unraveling minute by minute. She hadn’t convinced that idiot at the bank that she wasn’t responsible for overdrawing her accounts. She contacted her attorney as promised, but he hadn’t come up with anything yet. Said it would take a few days. Well, dammit, she didn’t have a few days! Lawyers. Always thought the world was on their time clock. Their slow-ticking time clock. Billable hours, they called it. Debbie knew exactly how long it would take for Simon Lewis to get his ass to the bank. Unless he crab-walked, there was no way in hell it should take a “few days.”
Of all times for Sara to get herself knocked up, she has to do it now? That girl amazes me. One minute she acts like a three-year-old and the next she acts like a woman of the world. Sara knows how to play people around her.
Of course, she’d learned from a master. Debbie was an expert manipulator. Only she chose what and whom she wanted to manipulate much more carefully than her daughter.
What a loser Josh was. She could just visualize Sara and him raising a child together. She certainly had her work cut out for her with that girl. But she couldn’t think about Sara or Don now. If something didn’t happen soon, they’d