Free False Pretenses by Catherine Coulter Page B

smiling brightly. So long ago. He still looked the same, she thought, gazing toward him now behind his desk. Black, black hair, olive complexion, and eyes as dark as an moonless night, a bit of nonsense she’d told him once, years before. They’d been a striking couple, Jonathan as tall and as lean now as he’d always been, a runner and an athlete who took care of himself, and she, petite, blond, and veryfair-complexioned. She felt suddenly vastly older than that smiling young woman in the photograph. She felt wrinkled inside, and useless.
    She said slowly, looking straight at him, “If you don’t come, Jonathan, I will leave you.”
    â€œThat is the idea. Don’t drive yourself, particularly if you intend to drink.”
    But he knew what she meant, and she knew that he knew. They stared at each other, so far apart now after seven years of marriage. They were strangers, but even the détente was no longer present. They were enemies and strangers. A stranger in a strange land? A stranger from a strange land? He couldn’t remember. She said nothing more, merely turned on her heel and left the study, banging the door behind her.
    He didn’t wince, he made no movement at all. He supposed he should get a divorce. He supposed he knew it had to happen, he’d just avoided thinking about it, even in their worst fights. He’d spent more hours working during the past three years than ever before in his career. It was a coward’s way, he knew. He was a coward, a coward with an appalling headache. He pulled himself to his feet to go find some aspirin.
    It was close to ten o’clock that evening before he felt human enough to return to his study and do some work. Anything to keep himself from thinking about Rose and her threat. Once, she’d been Rosie, his Rosie, soft and sweet. Long ago. He thought of the company, his computer company—NetFrame—that he’d built. Sure, he’d had help from Rose’s father in the beginning, but it was his, all his. He was thirty-five. Thirteen years of his life were in that company. Divorce would rend not just his life but also the company. He had control, clear control, but a settlement would prevent his plans for further expansion, perhaps even draw him perilously close to only a fifty-percent ownership. It was an appalling thought, particularly since one of his good friends, Peter Anchor, told him the rumors he’d heard through a friend of his in NewYork. Carleton Industries was sniffing around. ACI—Abercrombie-Carleton Industries. That ridiculously diversified conglomerate wanted an innovative and successful computer business that made powerful business computers, to go along with their shoe companies, their steel factories, their foreign hotels, their software companies, their textile companies, their publishing house, God only knew what else. But with a twist. They’d use him to provide an inexpensive substitute to traditional mainframes. They obviously wanted to go head to head with IBM. Well, he did, too, but he wanted to be the one to do it.
    He felt paralyzed. Who the hell was running that sprawling octopus? There’d been nothing out of the board of directors, not a sound. He remembered that the young wife had been acquitted of Timothy Carleton’s murder. The stock fluctuated alarmingly and The Wall Street Journal speculated endlessly, but everyone was keeping quiet. Not that it mattered; the family owned enough shares to put the power where it pleased, the board only an assembly of old men who nodded their agreement.
    It’s just a rumor, nothing more. You’ve been in on enough of those tactics to know it could be just that—a rumor.
    Carleton’s sons? Were they in charge? Or Timothy Carleton’s brother, Michael? No, more than likely it would be Timothy’s own children. What was the older one’s name—Brad, yes, Brad Carleton, a spoiled unethical bastard if ever there