“Why don’t you tell me?” he suggested, his voice taking on the quality of a smooth courtroom lawyer.

“But I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?” Accusation singed his words.

“No…I can’t imagine….” She was so taken aback by his supposition of an accomplice for Mitch that she hadn’t noticed the suspicion in his eyes, the way his arms crossed over his chest, the grim hard angle of his jaw. But now, after the shock of his statement had dissipated, she knew what he was thinking.

“You’re not…you couldn’t be,” she was stammering, but she couldn’t control herself. Slowly she stood up and watched the play of emotions that rampaged over his face. “I don’t believe that you would think I could somehow be involved. You wouldn’t be suggesting anything like that…would you?” Before the anger took hold of her, disbelief and agony tortured her eyes.

“Why don’t you explain…”

“No!” She stamped a bare foot on the thin floor of the gazebo. “I don’t have to explain anything to you….” Tears burned in her eyes, but she tilted her head defiantly in spite of them. As they began to flow slowly down her face, they caught the moonlight in tiny rivers of outrage. “Are you accusing me of embezzlement?” Her voice was as chilling as the wind that rustled the leaves overhead.

“Erin,” he said in a calm voice devoid of emotion. “I just want to know the reason for certain facts….”

“Facts? You mean evidence? I don’t believe it. You don’t have any evidence—you couldn’t, just an overactive and suspicious imagination!”

He tried to interrupt, but she wouldn’t let him. “I wondered, from the beginning, why all the questions about Mitch, why all the vague insinuations and especially why you would look at me the way you did. But I must have been a fool, a damned idiot, not to have put two and two together.” She took a gasp of cold autumn air, only to find that her entire body was quivering with rage and betrayal. “How can you stand there and accuse me, after all that we’ve shared together? Oh, Kane—why?”

“If you could just be reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” she shrieked, and then laughed from the tension that was capturing her in its angry claws. “Reasonable? How can you expect me to be ‘reasonable’ after you ask me to marry you and accuse me of a crime I didn’t commit?”

“Erin, don’t make this any harder than it already is,” he pleaded, and leaned against a beam that supported the roof. “I can’t ignore the facts, as much as I’d like to. I know that you need money—the employee loan application states as much—”

A protesting sound gurgled in her throat, but he ignored it.

“And your ex-husband, Lee Sinclair—” the name came out in a snarl of disapproval “—you loaned him money once, and he’s back in town.”

“How?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, and continued in a flat, dry voice. “And there was the securities key discrepancy. You were one of the people who had access to the bearer bonds that were taken, and suddenly, somehow, you find the money to paint the apartment house and fix it up for the winter. An odd set of circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”