Flashback by Justine Davis (classic reads .txt) 📕

“Let’s go hide and catch up,” Pepper said, grabbing Alex’s hand and tugging her toward the French doors that led out onto a terrace that had ever and always been graced with far too much cherub statuary for Alex’s comfort. But she went, and they found a curved stone bench to sit on, in the shadow of a wisteria tree in wild bloom, dripping with so many lilac-colored flowers it didn’t seem possible it was real.

It didn’t take more than a few minutes of Pepper’s chattering—and for all her sins, she spent little time on herself, being quite happy with her life—for Alex to realize she had an invaluable resource here. She felt a little qualm at pumping her old friend for information, but if she was going to run on and on anyway…

“—and Chad’s wife is pregnant again,” Pepper was saying as Alex tuned back in.

“Isn’t that about number five?” Alex asked.

“Four,” Pepper said with a barely concealed shudder. “Can you imagine?”

“I’d rather not,” Alex said, having grown up with a mother unable to deal with only two. “But Maria is so good with them, she’ll probably do fine. Some women have the knack.”

While she was speaking, she was trying to think of a way to guide the conversation to where she needed it to go. But Pepper was on a gossip roll. Alex tried to pay enough attention to keep her going until she could steer her toward the people she needed to know about.

Across the terrace, Alex saw a familiar figure. Senator Eldon Waterton, from his reputation no doubt returning from some assignation in the bushes, Alex thought wryly, half expecting some disheveled young thing to emerge from the same direction.

She wondered if it would be considered cynicism if it was true.

Pepper saw him, too, apparently, because she whispered, “Have you heard about Pierre and Charlene?”

Charlene was the youngest daughter of the senator, who was now glancing their way. She saw him frown, or perhaps it was just a squint as he peered at them, then hurried on.

Alex doubted he was worried; no one seemed to care much anymore about his peccadilloes. Perhaps because they seemed so ludicrous these days—a man his age cavorting with twenty-somethings. Or perhaps simple longevity and endurance—and notoriety and fame—earned you immunity in his world.

“No. What?” she asked, turning her attention back to Pepper.

“Charlene’s in town to get away, because he’s been having this very blatant affair with, of all people, her hair stylist,” Pepper said. “Everybody knew except Charlene. So now they’re divorcing, although you’d think Charlene would have learned from her mother how to just live with it.”

“Perhaps she learned from her that she didn’t want to,” Alex suggested.

“Maybe. But anyway, they hired the two most cutthroat attorneys back in Phoenix. Mom says by the time the lawyers are done there won’t be any money left to fight over, it’ll all be in the lawyer’s pockets.”

“That’s one way to resolve a financial dispute,” Alex said. The Watertons were notoriously wealthy, and Charlene had come into a huge trust fund when she’d turned twenty-one. She’d begun wildly spending, and had met the handsome, charming Pierre Laroque shortly thereafter. Despite everyone’s suspicions that he had his eyes on said trust fund as much as on the pretty but spoiled Charlene, she’d married him a year later.

Alex was beginning to see the point of trusts set up so that the beneficiary couldn’t touch them until they were older. If her grandfather had done that, maybe there would be more left of her brother Ben’s.

Maybe if he hadn’t been able to get to it until he was fifty, she thought, then felt guilty, as she always did when she thought that way about her exasperating but much beloved brother.

Trust Tory, she told herself yet again. She says there’s more going on with Ben than you know, so believe it.

“They have a daughter, don’t they?” Alex asked.

“Yes, and she’s devastated. Charlene’s dad is furious,” Pepper answered.

“I’ll bet,” Alex said. Waterton was notoriously short-tempered, and his tippling habit didn’t help matters any.

“Have you seen Rich Corbin lately?” Alex asked, hoping to use the mention of another acquaintance from their age group to nudge Pepper around to Richard Corbin senior, a name near the top of her list.

“Oh, he’s in Japan,” Pepper said. “He’s running the Asian branch of the company.”

Alex spotted her opening. “They must be doing well, then. Last I heard the Asian office was only a glimmer in his father’s eyes.”

“Oh, yes. His dad got some legal thing out of the way a few years ago and they’ve been booming.”

…got some legal thing out of the way.

Alex’s breath caught.

“Did he say that? That he ‘got it out of the way’?”

“Something like that,” Pepper said, frowning in puzzlement, no doubt at Alex’s interest in the specific wording. “But honestly, it was years ago, I don’t really remember.”

Alex did. She knew exactly what that legal thing was.

Marion Gracelyn.

Alex’s mind raced as she tried to remember. She’d paid little attention to it at the time, but the basics had been in the research she’d read. Corbin had tried to stiff the military on a contract for tank armor and had gotten caught. Marion, utterly fearless and unimpressed by his wealth, had made the case a cause. It was she who had made public his now infamous memo saying that “It doesn’t matter, it’s just the Army.”

He’d been stunned by the outcry, and had to step down as CEO after that. Insiders knew it was merely a sop to public demand, that his replacement was mainly a figurehead and that he was still calling the shots from behind the scenes. But Alex knew he’d never forgiven Marion for his public humiliation. That she’d only exposed his genuine attitude to the world was beside the point; it was still, in his mind, her fault.

But his company had recovered. Some suggested he’d bought its way back to success, some chalked it up to the public’s