Page 76 of Someone Like You

“Play the game of Russian Roulette if you dare. I won’t be the loser in that one, sweetheart,” I replied with a wink.

I stood and quickly moved behind her.

“You may want to watch your back and tell your father to watch his. Those thug-ass friends of mine you despised so much . . . they’re back in my life. And one or two are in prison.”

Her eyes widened in horror. I watched as she walked out the door and slammed it behind her. I had called Bethany and demanded that she meet me today. I told her to meet me at the hotel and to stop by the front desk, and they would direct her to where I was. She assumed that we would be meeting in a room, but I wasn’t about to screw up my good thing at home.

I met with her in a conference room around the corner from my office. She had no idea that I owned the hotel, and I had no plans on letting her know that. Not anytime soon, anyway.

I stood and headed out of the conference room and hopped in my car. My first stop was at an undisclosed location in the woods. When I exited my vehicle, I took a look around as I had done the entire drive to make sure I wasn’t followed.

I walked to the cabin and knocked twice before the door immediately opened.

“Travis.”

“Cas.”

We dapped it up before I took a seat on his worn gray and white couch.

“Everything work out for you?”

“Everything went according to plan. Those pictures blew her ass away. Thanks, man.”

“Any time. I knew all those years ago when you first connected with that family that they weren’t nothing but trouble.”

“And you told me that.”

“Glad your ass listened,” he replied and pulled two beers out of the refrigerator. He handed me one and then dropped into his recliner and popped open the other one.

We sat in silence for a while, drinking our beers, and although a basketball game played on TV, I suspected he didn’t watch it.

“I checked out your new girl,” he finally spoke up.

“Impressed with what you see?”

He sighed and set his beer down.

“I am. She’s had a hard time of it, man. She’s close to her family and friends but not close to her husband’s family. It seems like he wasn’t close to them anyway, so she didn’t see a need to keep up the relationships once he died.”

“Yeah, I figured as much.”

“I spoke with Beth’s attorney earlier.”

“Yeah?”

Travis nodded. “He destroyed the letter.”

“Thanks.”

“I saw that Nathaniel dropped those bombs,” Travis stated.

“That company’s about to shut the fuck down. Ain’t a gahdamn thing they can do to save it either. Feds already up in that bitch investigating everything.”

“And your name cleared, man?”

“Yep. Thanks to all those memos that got leaked to the Feds and not the press, I’m all good. They spoke with my attorney yesterday, and my shit is on the up and up.”

Travis Cunningham, a private investigator, was also a childhood friend. His father was a retired CIA operative who worked closely with my father in their glory days. Travis was the one who obtained the pictures of Bethany’s affair throughout our four-year marriage. His brother, Nathaniel, worked as an administrator at Carson, and he had been the one to record those meetings. It was Nate’s duty to set the conference rooms up for meetings. With Travis’s help, he was able to get some bugs and bugged the conference rooms and executive offices at Carson.

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