Intimate Betrayal by Linda Barlow

not even when he was accused of the brutal murder of his wife.
    She hated him still; she blamed him still. But, ruthless though she believed him to be, she’d been unable to make up her mind
     about his involvement in Francesca’s brutal murder.
    Was Matthew Carlyle innocent, and justly acquitted?
    Or had the state just freed a coldhearted killer?

Chapter Six
    Matthew Carlyle sat in his corner office on the third floor of the new building that housed Powerdyme and stared out the window
     at San Francisco Bay. A crystal tumbler of the finest single-blend scotch stood untouched on the desk at his elbow. Faintly,
     he could smell it, but he left it alone.
    The view from his office was magnificent, but the sun was too bright on his computer screen, and despite the climate control,
     the room was invariably hot. It was also cramped. And the floor-to-ceiling windows made him feel too exposed.
    The new building was, in fact, a disaster.
    He hated it, and his employees were none too happy in it either. And it was already too small.
    Although sales and profits were up and Powerdyme continued to dominate its end of the software business, a recent survey had
     shown that job satisfaction within the company had declined, always a troubling indicator. But it was unclear whether that
     was due to the new building or to the economyor to the fact that the CEO had just spent more than a year in jail.
    After the narrow confines of a stark cell in a correctional institution, Carlyle had figured he’d be overjoyed to be back
     in his sunny office. But the opposite was true. He hated it here, and he’d never been able to work productively in an environment
     he hated. This damn building had been wrong from the start.
    Just like everything else in my life.
    There are things you don’t think about while you’re locked up in jail, on trial for murdering your wife. You’d go crazy if
     you did. You don’t think about the good times—those early days of courtship, surrender, and joy when he and Francesca had
     still been in love. And neither do you think of the bad times—the all-too-many days after she’d started drinking when you
did
want her out of your life. How could you persuade a jury to set you free if they knew that you had occasionally committed
     murder
in your heart?
    None of them could possibly know what it had been like to live with a beautiful but volatile woman like Francesca, whose very
     existence seemed calculated to make men crazy. She’d been a superb actress, and only the few people she’d allowed close to
     her recognized her for the controlling, manipulative, deeply insecure woman she was.
    But you don’t think about that—you simply couldn’t allow yourself to remember all the torments she had put you through. And
     you especially don’t dwell on the fact that your unfaithful wife was pregnant, and that DNA tests admitted as evidence during
     the trial by your attorneys had proven that you were the father of her child. The marriage had been in trouble, yes, but if
     he’d known she was pregnant, after so many years oftrying to have a child, he’d have tried harder to hold things together. Much harder, dammit.
    He was forty-one years old. As the tabloids had proclaimed during the trial, for the last twenty years he had “led a charmed
     life.” He was the founder of one of the world’s most successful businesses and was, journalistic hyperbole for once accurate,
     a billionaire. But, like many extremely successful people, he’d discovered that all the money in the world couldn’t buy happiness,
     serenity, or peace of mind. Neither could it protect him from the slow-grinding wheels of the American system of justice.
    His friends—what few he had left—had advised him to let it go. Put it behind him. Don’t look back.
    But his friends hadn’t lived for a year and a half in a sevenby-nine-foot cell with a narrow bunk and a stainless steel seatless
     toilet, eating vile, fatty, unidentifiable food, and