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Tenley had scammed a lot of rich folks over the years. Lots of them. Like, a truly staggering number of rich folks.
But she had never seen anything like Knox’s childhood home.
She gaped at the mansion. “You lived…here?”
The place looked like it had been designed solely to appear in Architectural Digest. It sprawled across the lightly wooded landscape in all its mid-century modern glory—ten-thousand square feet of glass, steel, and river rock. It was gorgeous, but cold. Uninviting.
Not like Knox at all.
He parked the car in the ginormous circular driveway and followed her wide-eyed gaze to the house like he couldn’t figure out why she was so perplexed. “Yeah. My parents bought this place before my mom died.”
“You don’t think this is…a lot?”
Knox shrugged. “Of course it is. I never cared for it. I liked the little house we had before the company blew up. But this was my mom’s choice, so, I guess it’s home.”
This was surreal. Here was a guy in Discount Hut jeans, driving a borrowed Honda, fresh out of prison, and he grew up in real estate Nirvana. Meanwhile, she was sitting here in five-hundred-dollar shoes with a million bucks in her offshore account, and she came from a trailer park in Ass-end of Nowhere, Oklahoma. So much for the whole nature vs. nurture debate.
“You maybe should’ve put on the Tom Ford,” she muttered.
He let out a humorless chuckle. “Trust me. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Thadeus would still look at me like I’m dog shit on the bottom of his shoe. I might as well be comfortable.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s like battle armor. You don’t wear it to look good in front of the other knights. You wear it to do battle. Slay dragons.”
Knox raised a brow at her. “Slay dragons, huh? Is that why you dress like you’re walking a catwalk in Milan?”
Tenley’s nose scrunched up. “First of all, no designer would be caught dead sending a simple pencil skirt like this down the catwalk. Everyday clothes have no business at Fashion Week.”
“Noted.”
“Besides, won’t it help convince Thad that I’m a good little wife-y if I’m dressed well? Don’t want the guy thinking you snagged me off the street.”
His lip twitched. “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to call him Thad to his face.”
She waved him off. “I know you’re kidding, but baby, I could make Thad cry if I wanted to. Which probably makes this a good time to discuss your expectations.”
The way his eyes darkened made her think his mind had traveled to a decidedly not-PG-rated place when she said expectations. And the fact that her mind took the same journey just as fast was concerning. This could get messy if she wasn’t careful.
Tenley didn’t do messy.
“Not your expectations of me,” she clarified. “Your expectations for this whole visit. You don’t really just want the inheritance, right?”
His brow furrowed. “Why would I want more? That inheritance will set me up for life.”
Oh, Lord. He was like a six-foot-three infant when it came to her world. “You could want revenge for the years you spent in prison for something you didn’t do. You could want to take this house back, or your mom’s company. There’s a lot you could do to Thadeus if you wanted to.”
He thought about it for a moment, then said, “In prison, you go through the five stages of grief pretty fast. You deny that you belong there. Then you’re angry and want to lash out. Bargaining and depression can stretch out for years. But you eventually get to acceptance. That’s when you realize that things like rage and revenge just aren’t worth it. Besides, I have my suspicions about Thadeus, but I don’t know that he actually did anything to me.”
She snorted. “Well, that one I can help with. Put me in a room with the guy and I can tell you in five minutes if he’s the one who framed you.”
“Come on. There’s no way you can tell that in just one conversation.”
Oh, ye of little faith. “You’d be surprised what I can do.”
If she hadn’t been looking right at him, she would’ve missed it. But since she was looking, she caught the softening in his eyes as he said, “I don’t doubt it, Tenley. I don’t doubt it.”
* * *
Walking through the door of the house where he’d spent so much of his childhood was somehow worse than walking into Midfield for the first time.
