Irish Bear's Bride (Boston Bear Brothers 3)

“That will be fine.”

Once she was done there, Deidre returned to the bank where she’d found the envelope, stepping up to the counter to see a teller. She lay her identification on the counter and asked to check her account balance.

“Do you know your account number?”

“No. I don’t. My father opened it for me, and he’s quite ill. I need to see what assets I have available to care for him.”

“I see,” the woman replied, looking at the passport and typing something on her keyboard. After a moment, she looked back up from the computer.

“Two million five hundred thousand and fifty-three dollars,” she told her.

Deidre looked at her as if she’d slapped her. Who was this man and why did he have all this money that he’d made sure his daughter could access if anything happened to him? Why hadn’t he just said he had bank accounts in his notes? Nothing made sense about any of this. Had there been some sort of code in the envelope that the real Deanna would have picked up on that she was missing?

“Can I get a bank card for this account?”

“Of course. I’ll request one for you right now and you’ll have it in a few days.”

Deidre repeated the process from earlier and walked out trying to sort out her thoughts. As Deanna Caine, she was a multi-millionaire, but at what costs? Whose money was this, and would they be coming to look for it? Had they already come to look for it? Is that why there was no real Deanna Caine to be found?

The next stop was a self-storage locker at a local facility. Inside, there was just a round canister, which she was afraid to open. She tucked it into her bag and walked out. Each stop after that resulted in the same type of container being retrieved. When she was done, she had six of them, plus a small locked box for which she didn’t think she had a key small enough.

She glanced at her watch. It was almost time to go into the diner and she considered not doing so, but there was no guarantee of her actually getting the money in the banks. In her mind, they would figure out it was just a mistake or that she wasn’t who they thought she was before it really became hers.

She decided to just try to keep things normal for now, showing up for her shift and putting her stuff in a locker provided for her there. The irony of it didn’t escape her as she began her training in a bit of a daze. Her thoughts drifted back to the contents of her backpack over and over, her curiosity at what she’d find there almost making her forget the longing she felt for Niall for just a while.

By the time she got off from her shift, she was anxious to sort out the next piece of the puzzle, skipping the bus home for fear of getting mugged or something before she could even see what her treasure revealed. As soon as she was inside, she locked the door and pulled the blinds, sitting down at the kitchen table and carefully pulling each of the canisters from her bag.

She sat looking at them, laying them in a row across the table. She pulled the additional box from the bag and set it down in front of them, taking a deep breath before opening them one by one. When she was done, she sat staring at the piles she had made from each.

If her count was right, there was a total of 251,786 dollars. That was assuming that each stack was all twenties with no smaller bills stuck between them. Why did he have so much money tucked in separate places, and why was it in American dollars instead of pounds sterling?

She puzzled over this as she looked at the locked box in front of her. There was no key. She turned it back and forth, looking for a way in, but found none. She sat it back down and contemplated how to get into it. It was much like one of those fire-safe boxes, made of some sort of impenetrable material.

The only way to get in seemed to be an exceedingly small keyhole on one side. She continued to examine it for a minute and then went to retrieve a bobby pin, opening it to see if she could jimmy the lock with it.

After a while, she accepted that she was a failure at that and instead began shifting through the money to see if the bills were all, in fact, twenties. They were.

Unsure of what she was supposed to do with any of this, she retrieved the shoeboxes from her recent shopping and stacked the money inside, adding the small box to the last one. She stacked them in the back of the closet and covered them with the blankets from a nearby shelf. It wasn’t exactly secure, but it was the best she could do right now.