is on it.”
“You forged my signature?” I asked Riley.
“Oh, this is just wonderful!” Pierce chirped in my ear. “You tried to defend your volunteers but their guilt is even more obvious than it was before! As you can see Christie, I never touched your money. You’re projecting your own unhappiness onto me. I’m sorry you have taken in with such characters.”
He hung up.
I lowered the phone to my lap. The shuttle was bouncing along the road toward the visitor’s center. We were the only ones onboard, and the driver was looking at us in the rear-view mirror.
Riley held out a calming hand. “Christie, let me explain.”
“Oh, I think I understand just fine. You were given mandatory hours just like Logan. Except unlike him, you lied to me about it. Is that about right?”
His entire demeanor had slowed down, like he was trying to defuse a bomb. “I made a mistake…”
“And then you forged my signature! How’d you do that? Did you copy it from Logan’s sheet? What if the judge finds out?”
“I did everything wrong,” he admitted. “When I met you that first day I was… mesmerized by you. I didn’t want you to think less of me!”
I aimed an accusing finger at him. “Don’t you dare try to turn this around and blame me.”
“I’m not blaming you! I’m just saying I… I knew I liked you from that first moment. And I really wanted you to like me too. So I kept the community service requirement a secret, but I still needed to complete the hours, and…” He spread his hands. “I did something desperate. I wanted to tell you, I truly did…”
The shuttle parked next to the visitor’s center and opened its doors with a hiss. I grabbed my backpack and lurched to my feet. I almost fell down because my legs were stiff from sitting down after the hike, but I managed to keep my feet and walk off the shuttle with stubbornness alone.
“Christie,” Harper said as the two of them followed me back to my car. “Talk to us.”
I felt like my life was slipping away. My ex was still manipulating my accounts. All the money we had raised had somehow disappeared. Christmas was just two days away and now I had learned that the three men I cared about, the three men I was falling in love with, had been lying to me all this time. I didn’t know who I could trust anymore.
I wanted to burn it all down.
I whirled on them. “Did you steal from me?”
Riley stiffened. “We would never do that. How can you ask that after all we’ve been through?”
“The Riley I thought I knew would never have stolen from me,” I said. Tears were welling in my eyes but I blinked them away. “But you’re not him. You’re someone else.”
Harper stepped up. “Christie…”
“And you enabled him. You knew the truth all along and still didn’t say anything. That’s not much better.” I shook my head at Riley. “I don’t want your help anymore. You can go back to the life you had before you were forced to work with me.”
I stormed off, and this time they didn’t follow me.
35
Logan
I loved hiking in the back-country. For one thing, I rarely saw other people. Sure, it was my job to find other people and make sure they were okay and didn’t need help. But I liked it when I never had to.
For another thing, the views were amazing. I was hiking on the Tonto Trail, which wound through the middle section of the canyon to the east. The terrain was sloping prairie full of low brush and hard, compact ground. I saw a few rattlesnakes basking in the sun, but aside from them there weren’t a lot of critters around. It was quiet.
The hiking was easy, the sun was warm, and everything I needed in the world was on my back.
Well, almost everything.
I wasn’t the kind of guy who latched onto a woman emotionally. It took a long time for me to develop feelings for someone. In fact, out of the half-dozen or so women I had dated in my life, I’d only said I love you to two of them—and I’d only meant it once. I’d dated that girl for over a year before saying the words. Even that felt like I was rushing things.
But Christie?
Man, Christie had me over a barrel. I felt things for her that I had never felt in my life. Just picturing her in my head