But he also wanted to see where her energy and determination would lead them.
“What did you find?” he asked, smiling despite his memories of this room. With Ella in here, the bad memories were held at bay. He could simply look at her and know that there was good in the world.
“Malcolm!” she gasped, as if she’d forgotten that she’d just called out to him, letting him know that she was in here. He almost laughed, but then paused because he wasn’t sure how long he’d stood here in the doorway watching her.
“I just came from the hospital,” he said, not sure what relevance that had at the moment.
She blinked, then tilted her head. “Your father is still hanging on?”
Malcolm pushed away from the doorway. “Edward is still alive,” he clarified, preferring to distance himself from the old man, refusing to acknowledge the relationship.
She seemed to understand. “Right. Well, come here and look at this. Beth trusted me enough to show me Edward’s secret hiding place for his journals. He didn’t keep things on his computer, like most people these days. There’s a secret panel over there by the window,” she told him, waving her hand towards the middle window. “And I’ve just started going through it all. Edward had a code, but it wasn’t particularly difficult to figure out his system. Here’s what I’ve found so far,” she said, pointing to a spreadsheet.
Malcolm came around to the other side of the desk –an area that had previously been forbidden to him, as it was the place where Edward reigned supreme– and looked at the old journals spread out on the desk. Some were accounting journals, more like ledgers, and others looked like diaries, but as he skimmed through a couple entries, he realized they were explanations for the man’s crimes over the decades.
“He actually wrote this stuff down?” he asked, incredulous as he leaned forward, looking more intently at the information scrawled with Edward’s personal handwriting. The page currently displayed detailed a blackmail scheme for…Malcolm looked up at Ella, stunned. “He blackmailed the prime minister?”
Ella sat back in the enormous leather chair. “Not the current one,” she clarified. “It appears that Edward was even worse than we’d thought.” She flipped through several other pages. There were lists of illegal shipments containing animals, humans, drugs, and even a few arms shipments. But there was also a notation that Edward didn’t like the arms shipments because the power wasn’t in his favor. Another page detailed bribes to government officials, both in London as well as in countries all over the world.
“We’re going to have to cross reference these amounts against his bank accounts,” Malcolm commented grimly. “I’ll get my accounting staff in here to help. They can work on the financial end of things, while we work on the details.” He turned and looked down at her, then couldn’t resist pulling her into his arms. “Damn, Ella! What have you uncovered?” he breathed, resting his cheek on the top of her head as they stood there, stunned by what they had found.
“It’s pretty bad,” she agreed.
Over the next three weeks, Ella worked with Beth and Harvey at the estate while Malcolm hired a private accounting firm. At the advice of his legal team, the private accounting firm would keep everything separate from Malcolm and his private businesses, just so that there was no possibility of anyone associating his efforts at unraveling Edward’s misdeeds with Malcolm’s more legal businesses. This way, no one could claim that Malcolm hid anything once Ella’s story was published.
They worked side by side to piece together the details of Edward’s crimes during the daytime hours, but as soon as the sun set, Malcolm would collect Ella, lock everything up, and take her back to his place.
He wouldn’t touch her immediately though. Not until they’d both showered. It wasn’t a question for either of them. They simply stepped into his large, light-filled house…so completely different from Edward’s dark and heavy estate…and both of them silently headed up the stairs to the huge shower in the master bedroom, needing to wash off the smell of Edward’s crimes.
But as soon as they were both clean, Malcolm took her into his arms and made love to her. Sometimes, he took her slowly, kissing every inch of her until she was writhing beneath him, screaming out for him to give her that beautiful release. And other times, they couldn’t wait. She’d grab him and kiss him. He’d lift her into his arms