And Memaw? The only thing that had made these moves, this uncertainty, bearable was the fact that she was always there, at my side. How could I leave her behind, knowing that I would never see her again?
I couldn’t.
But what choice did I have?
It was so unfair. I wanted to charge into the federal penitentiary in Pollock and tell my uncle exactly what I thought of him. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be in this position. I could have graduated high school with all my friends, gone to Stanford like I had planned, gotten married, and had a few kids. I could have had the life I’d planned. Instead, I went to small universities in three different states, made and lost a dozen friends, dated a sporadic number of boys—none of whom seemed to matter enough to want to stick around. I could have had a life—instead of moving every few years, running from something that was never my story, never my problem.
But I knew that was unfair.
My uncle was in a tough spot. Who’s to say I might not have done the same thing he did? There’s not a person alive who wouldn’t jump at the chance for free money and an easy answer to an unsurmountable problem.
It was unfair that a hurricane took away all my uncle had worked for and unfair that he couldn’t find enough work to pay for my private school.
It was unfair that my parents died and left me on his doorstep, a confirmed bachelor who never wanted a kid.
It was all unfair.
I took a deep breath and washed my face, rinsing the bile from my mouth.
“Grow up, missy,” I told myself. “No more pouting.”
I walked back out to the booth where Richard continued to patiently wait for me. I could almost make myself believe he’d been waiting there since I ran out of the diner the morning before, waiting patiently for me to pull myself together. His eyes were weary, as he watched me resume my place across from him, but then he allowed himself a small, tight smile when I picked up the brochures.
“Which one would you recommend?”
He tapped his finger on the top edge of the one with the smiling man on the cover. “This one has a pool and a new activities director who believes seniors should be encouraged to socialize as much as possible, so she throws a lot of ice cream socials.”
I nodded slowly. “Memaw would probably like that.”
***
Madison
“They arrested Conrad yesterday.”
My heart skipped a beat, as I pushed the bathroom door closed and perched on the edge of the toilet. “Really?”
“But they released him a couple of hours later. The cops took my statement, but they said they didn’t think they had enough to charge him.”
“Did you tell them about the sticky note?”
“Of course,” Rawn said, his voice like velvet in my ear. “That’s why they arrested him. But it’s not enough.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
“Have you been able to identify the voice you heard? The one you said was familiar?”
It was all I thought about, but the man—whoever it was—spoke in a low whisper, and I couldn’t figure out why it sounded familiar. Was it really was someone I knew, or was just my mind playing tricks on me?
“I’m trying.”
“I know.” Rawn sighed. “I miss you. I wish you were here.”
“Are you still flying out to California to have Thanksgiving with your parents?”
“Yeah. My mom would be disappointed if I didn’t. She does the holidays up big every year.”
“Mine, too.”
“I’d take you with me, but—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Then why do I feel like I do?”
“Because you love me,” I said, a little bit of a teasing note to my voice.
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
He laughed, the sound like the most potent medicine known to man. My heart rose up and seemed to float even as this funny pressure started in my center, making me ache for his touch, his kiss.
How could I miss someone I had only known for a few months this intensely?
It almost scared me how much I wanted to be near him.
***
Mellissa
“How are you feeling, Memaw?”
She raised a thin, veiny hand in a gesture of nonchalance. “As well as an old woman can feel.”
It was her stock answer, but one that made me smile. Same old Memaw.
I crawled into bed beside her in need of a little comfort. It wasn’t a gray day, but it had been a long one. After my lunch with Richard, I went back to the office just in time for someone to open the flood gates on the phone. It rang every two seconds, everyone demanding to speak to Aurora about one project of another. And that was on top of calls that were misdirected from other departments, calls from the lab—scientists wanting to speak to Aurora about their projects, past and present—a couple of calls from Rawn’s office wanting to know why Russell hadn’t sent up the memos on the new project yet…it was a nut house. And, on top of all that, Russell spent most of the day coddling the new assistant—I swear he had a crush on her—so I was stuck accepting deliveries and tracking down paperwork that he normally dealt with.
And, to top it all off, Conrad called five minutes before I was ready to rush out of the building and into his arms to let me know he was dealing with a crisis and wouldn’t be able to take me to dinner as we had planned the night before.
What a crap day!
I lay my head on Memaw’s shoulder and sighed.
“Have a bad day, pumpkin?” she asked.
“The worst.”
“Don’t say that.” She twisted slightly, pressing her hand against the side of my head. “Any day that didn’t end in a grave is a good day.”
I smiled. “Uncle Mike used to say that.”
A long sigh slipped from Memaw’s lips. “My Mikey,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.”
We weren’t supposed to talk about him. The marshals stressed that dozens of times before they even began the process of moving us into the WITSEC program. If anyone overheard us discussing Uncle Mike, they would figure out who we were and our cover would be blown. We couldn’t even talk about him in private because it might cause us to slip and mention him in public.
But that was the one thing we never obeyed.
“They can take away my name, my home, and my friends, but they can’t take away what’s in my heart. Mikey and Dave are my heart.”
Dave was my father, my Uncle Mike’s older brother.
Memaw had lost one son. She wasn’t going to let some stupid rule allow her to lose another.
“Do you remember,” Memaw asked me now, “when you were about five and you fell off the swing at school?”
“I broke my arm.”
“Mikey was so frantic, pacing in the waiting room there at the hospital. I told him to settle down, that he was just going to frighten you. And you know what he said?”
Of course I did. She’d told this story a million times before. But I still asked.
“What did he say?”
“He said that you were his little girl, and when you were hurt, he was too. So he wasn’t going to settle down until he was able to hold you in his arms and make sure you were still in one piece.”
I smiled. “He never treated me like I was an unwanted burden.”
“Why in the world would you say that?” Memaw asked, twisting again so that she could see me. “You were never a burden to anyone.”
“But Uncle Mike never wanted kids. Yet, he was stuck with me.”
“He wasn’t stuck.” She sat up and took my face between both her hands. “You were only five days old the first time he met you. The first time your father laid you in his arms, your uncle was smitten with you. No one wanted what happened to your parents, but if they couldn’t care for you, he was damn well going to do it himself, and do it the best way he could.”
“But he didn�
�t ask to be named my guardian.”
“No, and he could have given you away. There were dozens of relatives who stood in line, wanting to take you off his hands: your Aunt Karen in Texas, your cousin, Tina, and her husband, Phil, and your Uncle Curt in California. Any of them would have gladly taken you off of Mike’s hands. But he wouldn’t hear of it.”
“You never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
Memaw lay back down and sighed again as I settled back down with my head on her shoulder. I stared at the television, but I didn’t really comprehend what was going on. I was thinking about my uncle, about all the times when I was a kid that he dated pretty young women, but always broke it off with them when it got too serious, all the times he refused to go out with his buddies because he needed to go to one of my many musical recitals or teacher-parent night at my school. All the things he missed out on because he had to deal with me. I had always thought it was my fault, that he was missing out on a good bachelor life because of me.
Maybe I was just an easy excuse. Maybe he missed out on those things because that was the way he wanted it.
That thought never occurred to me. It put my uncle’s choices in a new light.
“Memaw?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think Uncle Mike knew what would happen when he agreed to work for Johnny?”
“Who’s Johnny, sweetheart?”
I sat up a little and glanced at my grandmother. That soft, dazed look I knew all too well was in her eyes. I touched her soft, wrinkled cheek gently.
“Never mind.”
I curled back up beside her and closed my eyes.
Would she forget me when she went to the assisted living center? Would she forget she ever had a granddaughter who liked to curl up in bed with her and watch Law and Order?
Maybe.
And maybe that would be for the best.
***
I padded downstairs several hours later and flipped the lock on the front door. I should have been to bed hours ago, but sleep just didn’t seem that important tonight. I sat with Memaw until she was asleep, and then I just sat in a chair and watched her sleep. I remember waking up a few times when I was kid, catching her doing the exact same thing. Funny how life comes full circle.
I put the kettle on to boil and searched through the cabinet for some green tea. An inventory had been playing in my mind for hours, all the things I would need to pack for Memaw before she went to the center and all the things I would have to tell the center administrators to make sure she had what she needed. Tea. I would have to add that to the list. Memaw liked to have her tea first thing in the morning along with her toast. No marmalade.
There was so much. I wasn’t sure I could do it all in a week.
I had pulled out a legal pad and had the top sheet nearly filled with notes by the time the kettle began to whistle. At almost the same instant, someone tapped on the kitchen window.
I jumped, my thoughts going instantly to Madison and her recent ordeal.
I grabbed a knife from the block on the counter and flipped out the lights so that whoever was out there couldn’t see me. But when I did, a ghostly face appeared in the window, causing me to shriek.
And then I felt like an idiot when I realized it was Conrad.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded as I yanked open the front door and stepped out onto the porch.
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t hurt me! I promise I mean no harm.”
I realized I still had the knife in my hand. I stared at it for a second. “Well, that’s what you get, scaring the crap out of me like that.”
“Sorry. I didn’t want to ring the bell in case your grandmother’s asleep.”
“Very considerate of you.”
He slipped the knife from my hand and then wrapped his arms around me as he simultaneously guided me into the house.
“My mother did raise me to be a gentleman.”
“Did she also teach you to sneak up on girls who were recently the target of a kidnapping plot?”
“No, that one’s on me.”
I wanted to be mad, but I couldn’t. He was so handsome and he smelled so good and…we had so little time together.
I pressed my lips to his throat. His pulse jumped beneath them even as he slid his arms tighter around me for a brief moment.
“Kettle’s calling.”
“Oh, yeah.” I pulled away from him and rushed back to the kitchen, yanking the kettle from the burner as I did. “Do you want some tea?”
“Sure.”
I got another mug and another tea bag before pouring the hot water. When I turned to hand him his, he was studying the brochures I’d absentmindedly set on the counter when I got home from work.
“For your grandmother?”
“Yeah. Richard checked them out, said they were the best of the best.”
“This one has a good reputation,” he said, waving the one with that same smiling mocker on the front of it. “I have a client who sent his father there last year.”
“Yeah?”
“He seems pleased with it.”
“I’m supposed to go check them out tomorrow.”
Conrad set down the brochures and took the tea from my hands. “Do you want company?”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Well,” he said, cocking his head, “I’d have to rearrange my schedule and tell my other girlfriend that I can’t go to her gyno appointment, but—”
I slapped his arm. “Don’t be a jerk.”
“Of course I’d do that for you. I don’t want you to have to deal with all of this alone.”
“Thanks.”
I picked up my mug and wrapped my hands around it, warming them with the heat of the tea. “Everything go okay with your crisis?”
“We got it handled. I think the client will be pleased.”
“That’s good.”
He shrugged. “Depends on your perception.”
I blew on my tea, wondering what the crisis was, but aware that he would have told me if he had wanted me to know.
“I searched through Aurora’s desk at work.”
Conrad’s eyebrows rose. “You did?”
“I wanted to see if there was anything that might suggest she was involved in the kidnapping.”
“Mellissa—”
“I didn’t find anything. I thought you’d want to know.”
The relief in Conrad’s eyes was unmistakable. I hadn’t been sure until now that my theory might have feet to stand on, but now I could see that it did. He didn’t want to believe it, but he knew it was possible.
“I don’t think she would do something like that intentionally,” I said quietly.
His eyes dropped to his tea mug, his expression hidden by shadows and his impossibly long eyelashes. Why is it men always have longer eyelashes than women?
“Aurora is a brilliant woman. It was her intensity that got my attention from the very beginning, the way she would take something she deeply believed in and she would argue for it until her last breath—even if someone was able to prove her wrong a million times over. The idea that that…that that part of her is dying because of some stupid disease…”
He shook his head, anger oozing out of his every pore.
“I’m sorry.”
“Just, stop,” he said, glancing at me again. “Don’t search her things again. Don’t try to find something that isn’t there. Aurora would never do anything to hurt Cepheus. And if you start spreading rumors, someone’s bound to find out about her problem—”
“I’m not spreading rumors. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Yeah, well, if someone saw you looking through her things, it wouldn’t take long for gossip to spread.”
Like Russell and the new assistant.
I wasn’t about to tell him I had, in fact, been caught.
“No one will find out about her from me. But maybe they should from you.”
“She has a pretty high level position with the company. Don’t you think someone should know about her condition?”
Conrad set down his tea and turned away. “I think I should go.”
“I just think—”
“I know what you think. But this is none of your business.”
“She’s my boss, Conrad. If she makes a major mistake, and I knew about this and didn’t say anything, doesn’t that make me as responsible as her? As you?”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re leaving really soon, isn’t it?”
That hit me deep. I turned to the sink and watched as I poured the still hot tea from my mug. My hand shook, but I wasn’t going to let myself cry.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But you did.”
He came up behind me; I could see his reflection in the darkness of the window. But he didn’t touch me. He just stood there for a long minute, watching me the same way I was watching him.
“I should go.”
“You should,” I agreed.
He did touch me then, laying his hand on my shoulder for a long second, like he was patting a friend with a gesture of support. And then he walked away.
Was it possible I had been wrong? Was it possible he didn’t feel the same way I did?
If so, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that I was leaving.
Chapter Eleven
“Ms. Goldstein’s office.”
“Hey, Mellissa,” Rawn’s voice said warmly in my ear. “Is Aurora around?”
“She’s in a meeting, Mr. Jackman. Can I take a message?”
He must have heard the coldness in my voice because he cleared his throat in a nervous way I had never heard from him before.
“Listen, Mellissa, I know this whole thing with Conrad looks bad. But we have to check out every little piece of evidence—to make sure we’re doing everything we can to find the people who took Madison, the people who thought they were kidnapping you.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Chances are good that this thing with Conrad won’t go anywhere.”
“And there’s a chance that he’ll be charged with kidnapping. Is that something you can live with?”
The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 2 Page 11