From the Moment We Met by Marina Adair Read Free Book Online

anything—other than another potential client. Tanner wasn’t even sure he liked the guy.
    After his mom had walked out, Tanner was too young to stay at home and had spent his summers swinging hammers with his old man for college money. He’d worked on a few Hampton projects in high school, but hadn’t officially met the developer until they both lost big on a local start-up winery gone bad. Richard’s.
    “Wait. You didn’t know?”
    Abby shook her head and, holy Christ , he didn’t know how it was possible she hadn’t known. Not that he should be so surprised; Abby was so damn trusting she was the last one in town to figure out she’d married a lying, cheating sack of shit.
    “Nope, and I am tired of being left in the dark. Tired of being screwed with. Which is why I went to see Judge Pricket after meeting with Babs today about getting my divorce.”
    “What did he say?”
    “That it’s too late. Richard is, um . . . three years ago he was in a car accident in Budapest and he and the passenger both, um . . .” He heard her swallow, and a bad feeling settled in his gut. “Rodney was telling the truth.”
    Ah, hell. He hated the SOB for what he put Abby through, but for it to end this way was probably tearing her apart. Especially since he’d bet everything that Richard’s passenger was a very young, very attractive woman. “I’m really sorry, Abs.”
    “Me too.” She cleared the rawness from her throat. “Since the divorce wasn’t filed until this year, I am legally his widow.”
    “Abby.” He moved in to hug her, but was met with a tape measure instead.
    “Can you tell me the measurements of the windows on the wall behind you?”
    He looked at her for a long moment, and when he saw that she needed a minute, he eyeballed the top of the window and said, “Eleven by four.”
    She shrugged and wrote it down.
    “Are you going to fight for a divorce?” he asked gently. Richard was the last person he wanted to talk about, but if she had just been hit with that news, she probably hadn’t talked about it with anyone yet.
    “I don’t think so.” She dropped her head to look at—well, he didn’t know, except that it wasn’t at her sketch. And that she didn’t do it fast enough to hide the way her eyes shimmered, or the way she worried her lower lip—something she did when she was lying. All signs Richard had won, and he hated that. Hated that Abby had worked so hard to open her firm, get her life back on track, only to have that son of a bitch weasel his way back in and derail everything.
    “Is that what you want?” he asked, measuring the width. And, yup, four feet exactly.
    “No.” She stood, and even though she had that chin-up, shoulders-back thing going on, she still only came to his chest. “The last thing I want to be is Richard Moretti’s widow. And I sure as hell don’t want to go down as the woman stupid enough to stay married to a man who slept with half the town. But I want to move on . . . need to move on, and before I can, the town has to.”
    “You think a legal battle will bring it all back up again?”
    “No, but if I get the divorce, I don’t get Richard’s estate, which is still quite large, according to his lawyer, and the courts will divide it. If I’m his widow, I get the estate, and it would be enough to cover a lot of what was stolen from outside investors. Including you.”
    Last year, Abby had freaked out when she’d discovered Tanner had lost a million dollars in Richard’s scam.
    “Abby, if there is money to get, the investors will get theirs.” This he knew for a fact. His voice mail was filled with several messages from different investors, already asking him to help create a united front. “The minute that statue showed up, people got their lawyers working.”
    “Did you?”
    “No.” He stepped closer. “I’m a big boy, Abs. I understood the risks that came with investing in a start-up. This one didn’t work out. Most of them don’t.