helped his case when he’d been tried and convicted five years ago.
Repeating patterns. That had been brought up many times. An abusive father was likely to have raised an abusive son, who had gone on to be a murderer.
That was the natural progression, wasn’t it?
The natural progression of men like him.
Alicia had known that. Of course she had. She knew him better than any other person on earth.
Yet he hadn’t known her at all.
Well, he had ended up in prison, as she’d most likely intended. But he’d clawed his way out. And now he was going to stand up on the mountain in his fancy-ass house and look down on everyone who’d thought prison would be the end of him.
The best house in the most prime location in town. That was his aim.
Now all that was left to do was wait for Faith Grayson to arrive. By all accounts she was the premier architect at the moment, the hottest commodity in custom home design.
Her houses were more than simple buildings, they were works of art. And he was bound and determined to own a piece of that art for himself.
He was a man possessed. A man on a mission to make the most of everything he’d lost. To live as well as possible while his wife had to deal with the slow-rolling realization that she would be left with nothing.
As it was, it was impossible to prove that she had committed a crime. She hadn’t called the police, after all. An argument could be made that she might not have intended for him to be arrested. And there was plausible deniability over the fact that she might not have realized he’d gone to prison.
She claimed she had simply walked away from her life and not looked back. The fact that she had been accessing money was a necessity, so she said. And proof that she had not actually been attempting to hide.
He didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe her, and she had been left with nothing. No access to his money at all. She had been forced to go crawling back to her parents to get an allowance. And he was glad of that.
They said the best revenge was living well.
Levi Tucker intended to do just that.
* * *
Faith Grayson knew that meeting an ex-convict at the top of an isolated mountain could easily be filed directly into the Looney Tunes Bin.
Except, Levi Tucker was only an ex-convict because he had been wrongfully convicted in the first place. At least, that was the official statement from the Oregon State District Attorney’s office.
Well, plus it was obvious because his wife wasn’t dead.
He had been convicted of the murder of someone who was alive. And while there was a whole lot of speculation centered around the fact that the woman never would have run from him in the first place if he hadn’t been dangerous and terrifying, the fact remained that he wasn’t a killer.
So, there was that.
She knew exactly what two of her brothers, Isaiah and Joshua, would say about this meeting. And it would be colorful. Not at all supportive.
But Faith was fascinated by the man who was willing to pay so much to get one of her designs. And maybe her ego was a little bit turbocharged by the whole thing. She couldn’t deny that.
She was only human, after all.
A human who had been working really, really hard to keep on top of her status as a rising star in the architecture world.
She had designed buildings that had changed skylines, and she’d done homes for the rich and the famous.
Levi Tucker was something else. He was infamous.
The self-made millionaire whose whole world had come crashing down when his wife had disappeared more than five years ago. The man who had been tried and convicted of her murder even when there wasn’t a body.
Who had spent the past five years in prison, and who was now digging his way back out...
He wanted her. And yeah, it interested her.
She was getting bored.
Which seemed...ungrateful. Her skill for design had made her famous at a ridiculously young age, but, of course, it was her older brothers and their business acumen that had helped her find success so quickly.
Joshua was a public-relations wizard, Isaiah a genius with finance. Faith, for her part, was the one with the imagination.
The one who saw buildings growing out of the ground like trees and worked to find ways to twist them into new shapes, to draw new lines into the man-made landscape to blend it all together with nature.
She had always been an artist, but her fascination with buildings had come from a trip her family had taken when she was a child. They had driven from Copper Ridge into Portland, Oregon, and she had been struck by the beauty that surrounded the city.
But in the part of the city where they’d stayed, everything was blocky and made of concrete. Of course, there were parts of the city that were lovely, with architecture that was ornate and classic, but there were parts where the buildings had been stacked in light gray rectangles, and it had nearly wounded her to see the mountains obscured by such unimaginative, dull shapes.
When she had gotten back to their hotel room, she had begun to draw, trying to find a way to blend function and form with the natural beauty that already existed.
It had become an obsession.
It was tough to be an obsessed person. Someone who lived in their own head, in their dreams and fantasies.
It made it difficult to relate to people.
Fortunately, she had found a good friend, Mia, who had been completely understanding of Faith and her particular idiosyncrasies.
Now Mia was her sister-in-law, because she had married Faith’s oldest brother, something Faith really hadn’t seen coming.
Devlin was just...so much older. There was more than ten years between him and Faith, and she’d had no idea her friend felt that way about him.
She was happy for both of them, of course.
But their bond sometimes made her feel isolated. The fact that her friend now had this thing that Faith herself never had. And that this thing was with Faith’s brother. Of all people.
Even Joshua and Isaiah had fallen in love and gotten married.
Joshua had wed a woman he had met while trying to get revenge on their father for attempting to force him into marriage, while Isaiah married his personal assistant.
Maybe it was her family that had driven Faith to the top of the mountain today.
Maybe her dissatisfaction with her own personal life was why it felt so interesting and new to do something with Levi Tucker.
Everything she had accomplished, she had done with the permission and help of other people.
If she was going to be a visionary, she wanted—just this once—for it to be on her terms.
To not be seen as a child prodigy—which was ridiculous, because she was twenty-five, not a child at all—but to be seen as someone who was really great at what she did. To leave her age out of it, to leave her older brothers—who often felt more like babysitters—out of it.
She let out a long, slow breath as she rounded the final curve on the mountain driveway, the vacant lot coming into view. But it wasn’t the lot, or the scenery surrounding it, that stood out in her vision first and foremost. No, it was the man standing there, his hands shoved into the pockets of his battered jeans, worn cowboy boots on his feet. He had on a black T-shirt, in spite of the morning chill, and a black cowboy hat was pressed firmly onto his head.
Both of his arms were completely filled with ink, the dark