That was why he hadn’t revealed what was on the USB drive. He couldn’t even make eye contact because of his goggles, but if he did, he’d send her every last bit of his trust just like he was doing now. She’d do the right thing. He knew she would.
Suede faced him then, her lower lip quivering.
He nodded one last time, for what it was worth. Who knew? He might have just signed York’s death warrant.
With a whimper, Suede twisted the goggles off her head. They fell into the drift at her feet. The beanie went next, spilling all of that gorgeous hair over her shoulders. Setting her spirit free. The sun drew a halo of golden highlights behind her head, transforming her into the angel Chance knew she was.
“Look at me,” she ordered York, her pistol raised and on target. “I want you to know who killed you. I want you to know it was me, Suede Tennyson, the woman you used and abused for years. I want you to know that I lived despite everything you did to me! I’m finally happy, Lionel. And I’m strong enough!”
Her voice pitched higher at every word, but her hand didn’t waver, and Chance prepared for the inevitable. Yeah, she’s mad enough. She could do this.
When the bastard refused her order to look at her, Chance lifted York’s left arm until it tweaked his shoulder socket. “Hard way it is. You will obey this lady or I’ll throw you off myself. And I won’t waste a bullet before I do.”
York turned his prideful head to Suede. “That bitch is no lady. Tennyson’s little girl spreads her legs for any creep who comes alone. Guess it’s you now, asshole. That’s how she is.”
Chance sucked in a deep breath of patience and let Suede do what she needed to do.
“I loved you,” she told York, her chin quivering, but the pistol in her hand still straight and true.
She blinked, and Chance’s heart melted at her feet. Those were tears in her eyes, and not from the wind. She was crying for this douche bag? Don’t, baby, Chance sent her. Cry for men of valor, not creeps who abuse women. York doesn’t deserve a single one of your tears.
“No, you didn’t!” York shrieked. “You wanted a good time and I gave it to you. High-end clothes. All the best booze. Designer drugs. Who do you think bought that crap for you? Your daddy? Guess again!”
“I never did drugs,” she said with a proud toss of her mane, her blue eyes gone hurricane dark.
York didn’t know when to shut up “Yeah, you did, you just never knew it. I put ’em in your booze. Christ, you’ve been nothing but a pain in my ass since your old man talked me into babysitting. I had to do something to loosen you up, you frigid whore.” He had the nerve to lean forward into Suede’s face. “I can get a better piece of ass in any back alley, anytime, any day.”
Chance had heard enough. He tweaked York’s shoulder a stiff one rather than let him disrespect Suede one more time. “It’s time,” Chance told her. If you’re going to do this, get it done.
“Ouch! Damn it. Stop! You’re hurting me!” the bully cried.
Her pistol sank to her side, her finger off the trigger. Her lips pinched as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t, and Chance released the breath he’d been holding. That’s my girl.
“I knew you couldn’t do it!” York shrieked, grinning like a fool and hopping on his frozen bare feet like he’d won the contest. “You’re nothing but a cock-blocking tease, Suede Tennyson! You’re just like your old man said you were. You’ll never amount to anything. I knew it! You can’t do it!”
Enough!
“But I can,” Chance growled.
That was all it took. York jerked out of Chance’s grip and screeched like the devil had just twisted his balls. Too late he realized his mistake. Overcorrecting and panicked, he flapped his arms as his fatal mistake hit home. He fell, sliding backward over the same edge he’d shoved Suede off, clawing at the icy edge for purchase he’d never find.
“Help me!” he ordered, one hand stretched to the woman he’d tried to kill.
“Hang on!” Suede screamed as she lurched for him, her fingers stretched wide to save him.
But it was too late. Chance grabbed her before York could pull her over with him. He fell screaming to the now frozen pond at the bottom of Mother’s Day Falls. Only there was no happy-go-lucky pup playing in the snow to find him today, and the shallow pond was frozen rock solid. He’d hit the ground hard. There’d be nothing to rescue. Ask Chance if he cared.
But Suede collapsed to her knees at the edge, her pistol flat in the snow beside her. Gut wrenching sobs choked her. “I.., I wasn’t going to shoot him. Honest. He knew that. I tried to reach him. I did, I really did.”
Chance couldn’t take it. He dropped beside her and dragged her onto his lap. “It’s okay,” he told her as he started to rock the woman he loved there on the edge of his mountain. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Shush. It’s okay.”
“He k-k-killed me,” she cried, her teeth chattering and her heart broken all over again. “Right here. This is the same spot. He shoved me, and he thought he killed me, but I didn’t want him to die. Not really.”
“You’re tougher than he was, baby. You just proved it by trying to save him. Please don’t cry.” Chance pressed her ear to his heart, scraping his own goggles away so there’d be nothing between them. If she’d only tip that pretty face up and see him. “God, you were amazing. You stood there and faced him down. I’m so proud of you. Most guys wouldn’t have the balls to do that. Then you let him live, when he didn’t deserve it. You gave him every chance to be a man, and guess what? York wasn’t one to begin with. In the end, he got what he deserved.”
“He killed me,” she whimpered. “Right here on this spot. He kicked me like I was a piece of garbage that he didn’t want to look at anymore. In the face, Chance!” Like I don’t already know that? “Then he gave his friends my stuff like I was… like I was n-n-nothing.”
She sobbed harder as her voice ramped up, and this had to stop. They still had a tough climb down and Chance didn’t need a hysterical woman on his hands, not while rappelling where one mistake could end a person. Yet he kept quiet. He’d said his piece. It was up to Suede to make peace with what had just happened.
She lifted her chin and looked at him then. “W-w-was he right? Did my dad make a deal with him to t-take me off his hands? Did he pay him to kill me?”
Chance nodded. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you all of this before we came up here today, but yes. From the evidence we’ve gathered, it looks like your father intended York to take over Portland’s Port Authority.”
“Why?” she ground out, her voice sad and empty. “What did I ever do to my dad but try to stay out of his way? I was a good girl. I got good grades, and I excelled in most of my classes. Six universities accepted me even after I moved out of the Governor’s mansion. I could’ve gone to Willamette U! Gonzaga wanted me. What more did he want?”
“Just because a man makes a baby doesn’t make him a father. Look at my sperm-donor dad. He walked out on Mom and us boys when I was three.”
Suede buried her face in his chest, sobbing so hard that her shoulders shook, and he sat there and took it. Life shouldn’t have to be this difficult, but there were plenty of people across the world in worse conditions than hers. He just didn’t love them the way he did Suede Tennyson.
Man, she was tough. He’d expected her to wail because York had taken flight, but that wasn’t what this meltdown was about. Her last week had been one wretched revelation after another, and all the betrayals had finally overwhelmed her. His gut clenched. Damned if he didn’t have another unsettling truth to tell her. “You still have that USB?”
Patting her chest pocket, she nodded. “Right here. You want it back?”
He shook his head, his mouth gone dry. “No. Do you want to know what’s on it?”
Her face scrunched into adorable wrinkles he wanted to kiss. “I don’t know. Do I?”
He nodded once. This had to be done and it had to be done now. She needed to know. “York’s buddie
s videoed your death. Your murder.”
Her breath hitched as her mouth formed a silent O.
Chance swallowed hard. “We need to watch it when we get home. Just you and me. Then we need to decide what to do with it.”
“You... you knew?”
“I overheard them fighting last time I was here, so yeah, I knew.”
“God,” she breathed, her palm over the pocket where that despicable piece of evidence rested. “W-why?”
Why what? Why didn’t I tell you what I knew? Why did I keep it from you? Why am I so scared to tell you I love you that my chest hurts thinking of what I’d be without you?
As if she’d read his hesitation, Suede rephrased her question. “Why’d he film what he did to me?”
Oh, that. “York filmed it, so he could force your father’s hand,” Chance told her, though he wasn’t convinced Tennyson hadn’t been in on Suede’s attempted murder all along. Chance just didn’t have the heart to tell her that.
Her hair whipped into a curtain, hiding her face. Her breasts heaved. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Don’t try. We’ll never understand men the likes of York and your dad,” Chance told her as he circled her tender body in his arms and vowed to protect her as long as he lived.
Governor Tennyson was a pig not to have recognized the brilliant woman living under his roof before he’d thrown her to a dog like York. That was a thought. Maybe the esteemed governor and his wife recognized something in Suede years ago that they couldn’t compete with. Maybe her brand of courage and honesty threatened their tidy, selfish little worlds. That would explain a helluva lot.
At last, she calmed. Her breathing leveled out. He stroked her back and shoulders. “It is pretty up here,” she murmured sadly, her head turned to the west, her ear still against his heart.
Tell her.
Chance wanted to, but this didn’t seem the right place or the right time. A bastard had just died, and marking York’s death with tender words meant for Suede alone seemed sacrilegious, if not downright obscene.
Instead, Chance looked out across the valley where he lived. Smoke curled from the scattered chimneys of all the neighbors he didn’t yet know. The sun was low in the sky, painting the landscape with all its yellows, oranges, and hints of purple. Dusk would come soon, and with it, the first of the evening stars.
They needed to be down before then. Gallo would be waiting. But for now, sitting with Suede was an extraordinarily pleasant respite in a world gone bat-shit crazy. Chance had chosen well. This mountain and the valley below were beginning to feel like home. So was the woman hugged up against him.
“You ready?” he asked, tipping back, wishing she’d look at him now that she’d witnessed what he was capable of. Worried that he’d see recrimination.
He didn’t. The prettiest tropical blue eyes peered up at him, her thick, lush lashes rimmed with tiny tears that looked like diamonds. “Thank you, Chance” —she swallowed hard— “for believing in me.”
He nodded like the lap dog he was turning into. For Suede, anything. “I do believe in you. You’re the strongest woman I know.”
Her lips curled into a tired smile. “All this time, I thought I had to change who I was to make other people happy, only I never could.”
“You make your own destiny, Suede. It’s not about the family you’re born into. It’s what you decide to do with the life you’ve been given. You find your real family along the way. Sometimes they’re SEALs. Sometimes…” He let the words go unsaid. They’re angels who fall into your heart when you least expect them.
She nodded. “I know that now. The thing is, the more I tried, the more fu-, umm, I mean, the worse things got.”
He sealed her lips with his index finger. “Wait a sec. Was that you not swearing?”
Suede nodded, scrunching her shoulders like an embarrassed kid. “I still slip sometimes, but yes. I’m trying.”
Why that mattered, he wasn’t quite sure, but it seemed as if Scarlett Sinclair was smiling over his shoulder.
Suede continued. “I’ve only had one real girlfriend in my life, Chance. Her name’s Karen Singleton, and she lives in Salem with her mom, but you know what? They get along, and they like each other. They really do, and when I was with them, I’d look at their happiness, and I’d be jealous because…” Suede swallowed hard. “I wanted what they had.”
“You don’t have to change a thing,” he told her honestly.
“Not even for you?” she asked, peering up at him with those big, dewy eyes again.
“Never for me,” he promised her, gathering her in for one last hug. “I like you just the way you are.” Chicken! Say it.
“I love you, Chance,” she whispered, her index finger on his lip, lighting him up even there at the edge of what now was a murder come full circle. York had truly reaped what he’d sown. “Do you have his ring on you?”
Guilty as charged. Chance swallowed hard. “I do,” he said as he fingered the weighty diamond up from an inner jacket pocket. “I always planned to give it back to you, but I had other things on my mind once I thought I’d lost you. I forgot about this.” He handed the three carats over. “I need to make a call.”
Suede’s chest heaved with a long deep sigh, the diamond catching the sun’s rays as it passed from his fingers to hers. “I can wait.”
Chance thumb-dialed Senator Sullivan and said the words his boss waited to hear. “Justice is served.” His caller ID would tell the rest of the story.
In a way, he regretted York falling like he had. The man needed to be questioned, but Suede also needed closure, and she would forever matter more than the man who’d tried to murder her. Chance stuffed the phone back in his pocket. “Now where were we?”
A mischievous smile quirked the corners of Suede’s lush lips. “Do you know what I’m going to do with this?”
He shrugged. “Throw it for all I care.”
She bounced to her feet, tugging him to join her. “Exactly.”
Before he could protest, she cocked her arm over her head, and…
Zing! The diamond ring flew in a sparkling arc over the crystal clear icicles of Mother’s Day Falls. Chance lost sight of it then because the lady of his dreams circled his neck with both hands, tugging his mouth down to her lips. “I hope you don’t mind, but I had to do that. It was bought with blood money, Chance,” she breathed against him. “It’s cursed. It had to go.”
Good girl.
Up on her toes, she laid a scorching French kiss on Chance’s mouth, tangling her tongue with his, breathing hard, and it was all he could do to not lay her down and eat her up. But he’d never look at Old Man Mountain the same way if he did.
When she’d had her way with his mouth, a resolute smile replaced the gloom. She winked, nodding toward the granite ledge they needed to drop over before dark. “Take me home?” she asked slyly.
Chance grabbed her into his arms and spun in a slow circle away from the edge as he said what he planned to say for the rest of his life, “Yes, ma’am.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chance looked ruggedly handsome by candlelight. After he’d taken care of Gallo, fed him, watered him, and let him outside to take care of his business, they’d settled in Chance’s office to watch York’s video clip. It reduced her to tears. Chance had been compensating ever since.
Suede lay facing him now in his stylish extra-wide hammered-copper bathtub, the one she hadn’t known about until tonight. Guess those other doors in his bedroom weren’t all closets.
She’d never seen such a lavish thing, nor had she ever seen a more glorious male in the nude. After he’d filled it, she’d lit the array of white candles on the windowsill. He thought his scars were ugly, but she had no problem with any of them. If anything, she loved them. They’d made him the man he was right now. What a sight.
He took up half the seventy-eight inch long tub, and his bulky male-body made her feel delicate. Like a lady. Like a treasure. She needed that since the
y’d viewed York’s disgusting video. The jerk who’d held the camera, Pablo or Philip, had filmed the show from the edge where she’d fallen. They’d planned it, all of them, and the camera had caught everything. The terror in her eyes when York knocked her down. Her desperate scream when she’d slipped over the edge. The raw fear when she knew he meant to kill her. The stupid hope in her eyes when she’d reached for him, begging him to save her. Thinking he would.
The camera had even caught York’s vicious kick and the way her head had jerked back on her spine upon impact. The clip ended with York leaning over the edge, his hand cupped to his mouth, bellowing as she fell, “See you at the bottom!”
If that wasn’t ugly enough, York had then turned to his men, dusted his gloved palms together and said. “Anyone hungry?” Like he hadn’t just murdered a woman. Like she’d meant nothing.
Chance had taken over then. He’d scooped her up and smothered her with kisses before she dissolved into tears. He’d wiped her eyes so tenderly, and he hadn’t let go of her since, not even when they’d made love. Twice. Both times he’d used a condom, which made her smile despite the gloomy mood she hadn’t quite shaken. She needed to tell him she was on birth control. He’d just seemed so earnest in protecting her that she hadn’t had the heart, but she planned to. Any minute now.
Being with him like this freed Suede in ways she was just realizing. Smiling became a tiny bit easier now that the whole truth was finally out. Well, most of the truth anyway. And love really did cure a person’s soul. Suede could feel her heart thawing. How could it not with the care Chance lavished on her? He hadn’t said the word yet, but his feelings showed in everything he did.
But who knew rappelling down a granite mountainside could be so scary or so fun? He’d shown her a whole new world today, and it was clean and bright and safe. Like him. He didn’t do drugs, not even the prescription kind, and he believed in honor, his mother, and his country. His brothers. Me.
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