He smiled. “Maybe you can.”
She nodded. “I’ll go make supper.”
“Try not to worry.”
“Of course.”
* * *
But she did worry, and she didn’t sleep. She went in to work the next morning with a feeling of foreboding.
Dr. Rydel was at the counter when she came in.
“I’m five minutes early,” she said abruptly when he glared at her.
“Come into my office, please,” he said.
She brightened. At last, he was going to explain. Surely it was something that didn’t have anything to do with her.
He let her in and closed the door behind her. He didn’t offer her a seat. He perched on the edge of his desk and stared at her coldly. “I had a visitor Saturday morning.”
“You did?” An ex-girlfriend, she was thinking, and he wanted her back, was that it?
“Yes,” he replied curtly. “Your boyfriend.”
“My what?”
“Your boyfriend, Frank Bartlett,” he said coldly.
She felt sick all the way to her toes. Frank had come down here! He’d come to Jacobsville! She held on to a chair. She should have told Bentley about him. She shouldn’t have waited. “He’s my ex-boyfriend,” she began.
He laughed coldly. “Is he, really? Now that’s not what he said.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cappie could almost imagine what sort of story Frank had told Bentley. But now she understood his anger.
“I can explain,” she began.
“You told me Friday night that you had an ex-boyfriend,” he said icily. “I didn’t get to hear the rest of the story, but Bartlett was kind enough to fill me in. You accused him of assaulting you and had him arrested. He actually spent time in jail and now he has a felony record because of you.”
Her eyes widened. “Yes, but that isn’t what happened…!”
“I know all about women who like to play with men,” he interrupted. “When I was in my early twenties, I worked for a veterinarian while I was in college. It supplemented my grants and scholarships. He had a vet tech who was very pretty, but never got dates. I felt sorry for her. She could only work for him part-time, because I had the full-time position. She stayed late one weekend and teased me into kissing her. Then she very calmly tore her shirt, messed up her hair and phoned the police.”
Cappie felt her face go pale.
“She wanted my job,” Bentley continued cynically. “I dipped into my savings to hire a private detective, who discovered that it wasn’t the first time she’d pulled that stunt. She was arrested and my record was cleared. The vet hired me back in a heartbeat and spent years trying to make it up to me.”
“I had no idea,” she whispered.
“Of course not, or you wouldn’t have tried the same stunt on me.”
She blinked in disbelief. “What?”
“You were always talking about what you’d do if you had money. You knew I was well-to-do. When were you going to accuse me of assaulting you? Have you got a lawyer waiting in the wings to sue me?”
She couldn’t believe her ears. He actually thought she was playing him for cash. Frank had lied to him, and with his background, Bentley had fallen for the tall tale.