“I’ll learn how to make it,” I told him as his eyes met mine.
“I suspect you’ll be over here more often because you’ll have to learn how to cook all of this, Jaynie.” My mother laughed. Her mission was accomplished by spoiling Xander with her good food. Now, I would have to visit her more…for cooking lessons.
“I guess I will be right here.” I chuckled. “Anything for you, Xander.”
“Thank you, baby,” he replied.
“Yeah, you guys are going to be just fine,” my mother said.
I could say the moment I fell in love with Xander was the first time I laid eyes on him, but that would be a lie. When I met him, he was a womanizing jerk who thought the sun rose and shined on him and him only. He was arrogant, yet everyone flocked to him.
After talking to him that night at Jeb’s club, and finally getting to know him, I saw a different side of the man everyone else thought was the party king. We started this hot and cold friendship that neither of us seemed to understand until one day I was finished. I couldn’t let my heart go back and forth with Xander any longer. I didn’t know he was walking around with a secret that could easily wreck a man.
When Xander opened up to me and told me what he suspected his father had done to his mother, my heart went out to him. I wanted to be there for him. I wanted him to know that all his secrets were safe with me. He was safe with me.
In that time of giving and taking, I found out that it was safe to give my heart to him. Now that we have matched our hearts and snatched each other’s souls, there was no turning back. We have both been broken down and rebuilt again as one. So damn right, I’m making sweet potatoes!
The end… For Now.
Rustic Liaisons
By
Falon Gold
Rustic Liaisons Synopsis
A winter fling with a side of moral hacking, how can those two ever be found in the same situation? When an inner-city kid, who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and racked up debt to get a law degree, gets thrown together with a devastatingly handsome playboy needing to find out why there are millions in his account before the law catches up with him, anything is possible.
Attorney Deidre Lanier isn’t all the way ashamed of her criminal history. She does want to leave it behind for a brighter future than lingering student loans will allow though. Her past, compassion, and debt gets her tasked with saving wealthy, commitment-phobe Brocklyn Devereaux. He can’t save himself with all the money that was in his account before someone added more and framed him for embezzling it.
Deidre hikes out to his rescue—it takes a criminal to catch a criminal, right?
But who’s going to save her and Brocklyn from each other?
And what did Brocklyn do that was so bad his life is maliciously upended?
Copyright © 2020 Falon Gold
All rights reserved.
Prologue
Lexington, Kentucky
~Brock Devereaux~
An annoying chime penetrated the black void of my sleep. After a week-long battle in court, victory drinks until two a.m., it felt like I just laid down on silk sheets and a cloud disguised as a mattress on the enormous California-king bed. Apparently, I was just going to have to get right back up. I would, long enough to hurt the feelings of the idiot calling me before my alarm went off at seven for my flight home.
Reaching out, I slammed a hand down on the massive mahogany nightstand, feeling across its surface for the phone. Not bothering to open even one eye, I right-swiped across the screen, accepting the call before slamming the device to my ear and barking into the mouthpiece, “What!”
“Get up, Brocklyn! Get up now!” my brother barked back. DeAngelo never barked, growled, used my full name, or blinked unless it was absolutely necessary.
It usually wasn’t since he wasn’t married, didn’t have kids nor current girlfriend, and we got along famously before and after my two-year stint at Devereaux Law Firm. That place was his baby and mistress in one. Running the business as it was supposed to be, together, was too much even for our tightknit relationship. I was a micromanager watching every penny, lady’s man in my off hours. DeAngelo would find a way to be laidback even if the sky was falling down.
Not much flustered him except when I turned bean counter with a microscope. At the moment, he was without a doubt flustered. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Both of my eyes flew open as my black-brief clad, beefy ass hit the mattress, long legs and bare feet swinging over the edge.
“Lo, what the hell is going on at…” I broke off, rubbing the haze out of my eyes to peep at the clock. Its neon-red numbers were the only source of light in the pitch-black bedroom with floor to ceiling windows. “…five o’ too damn early that has your panties in a bunch?”
“The FBI just left my house with a warrant for your arrest! They went to your home first! Obviously, you’re not there or here! The only reason I’m not in jail is because lead agent Nina Madison believed me when I said I didn’t know where you were because I don’t!” Old classmates tended to know what you looked like when you lied.
I wasn’t in Louisville but Lexington at a high-rise apartment on loan to me by a client. DeAngelo was flat out panicking. He didn’t panic. Ever. It was enough to make me panic without the FBI looking for...
“Wait a damn minute!” I shouted. “Looking for me?” That shocker was enough to wake me up fully and ponder what fresh hell was this. “For what?”
I hadn’t broken a law in, well, six months when I acquired a super speeder ticket. Talking my way out of losing my license before Judge Cavanaugh wasn’t hard to do. She was soft on the Devereaux boys, a benefit of her being an old flame of my father gone for four years but not forgotten for a host of reasons by the women he smooth-talked out of their panties. Add the facts that I was a lawyer in a long line of them with a very tight grasp on the law formed before I could walk and could find a loophole within a loophole, not many judicial system servants stood a chance against me. Or, so I liked to believe with ninety-eight percent of my cases won as of today.
“Brock, listen to me!” DeAngelo roared. “Nina said they received an anonymous tip along with proof that you’ve been embezzling funds from the firm!”
I grimaced, sitting up even straighter on the side of the bed. “That doesn’t make any sense. My firm is my firm. Why the hell would I steal from myself?”
Brocklyn Deveraux and Associates wasn’t the biggest law office in Kentucky, nowhere near the size of our father’s legacy run by my brother. Although, I wasn’t doing too shabby myself. In my employ were an assistant, several junior associates hoping to become partner one day, quite a few receptionists, cleaning crew, payroll department plus an accounting division to make sure shit like this didn’t occur.
Embezzling money that was earned, mine and went into mine or my firm’s account before it went anywhere else was outright ridiculous. Anything more serious than a speeding ticket, I wanted nothing to do with it.
“Not your firm, Brock, mine!”
Eyes adjusting to the darkness and in mid reach for the lamp on the nightstand, his words registered. I froze in place. “That really doesn’t make any sense. I’m not affiliated with your firm anymore nor have access to accounts to siphon money.” We weren’t stupid enough to leave an opening like that for past employees, blood or not.
Even if I did have access, I wouldn’t steal from him anyway, mainly to avoid conversations like this at this time of night. Day if that floated your boat. Then, there was the element that I wasn’t a thief. No one worked harder than me who played hard as my reward. Or, I would be in my own bed an hour away, not necessarily sleeping though, after delegating to someone else in my firm the high-profile case I took on as a favor for a very guilty celebrity. I really loved my bed, sometimes more than my own brother, and that was saying something.
“You know that, Brock. I know that. I tried telling the FBI that, but there’s a digital trail from a Devereaux client’s investment account accessed with
your old password leading straight to your account that says differently.”
I leapt to my feet, the expensive but frigid Italian tile barely felt beneath my toes. “I don’t give a flying fuck what it says, Lo, I didn’t take the money or put it anywhere it isn’t supposed to be. Besides, there’s no alert from my bank that there’s more money in my accounts than there should be, personal, business, trust fund or otherwise.”
“Brock—”
“You can check them all if you…”
Maybe I should check first just to be on the safe side.
Shifting the phone from my face, I browsed the icons displayed at the top of my screen for missed text messages. Sure enough, there was one that hadn’t woken me. It would be too much to hope that a family member wanted to check in—the few relatives we had on this side of heaven weren’t speaking to us thanks to bad relations with our father, DeAngelo Brocklyn Devereaux.
He didn’t much care whose woman he hit on, slept with when he was six feet above the earth much to my mother’s embarrassment. Her second born, DeAngelo, wasn’t the only one that didn’t have a current girl. Anyone I dealt with sexually knew upfront I didn’t do relationships, and not to bother me during an opened case as well. Nevertheless, there was one entity that wouldn’t care about my superficial affairs, opened cases or my rule concerning both: my banking institution. My heart dropped, stomach rolled. A nagging feeling began whirling in my gut. It knew what the text would say, and all the commotion within was about to make me seasick.
“Brock,” DeAngelo called.
“Just hold up a minute, Lo,” I bade, opening the text.
As suspected, Clairmont Mutual Banking had received a sizeable chunk of money on my personal behalf. Three point four million dollars to be exact, bringing my balance to five point six million, and there were no such things as coincidences in my book.
“What the fuck?” I muttered hoarsely.
Any other day of the week, I’d have been thrilled for the windfall. The measly two million and change in my personal checking account was good enough. It was what I had worked my ass off for. The ten million in my trust, not so much. The government wouldn’t have zero damns about how I obtained a penny, would’ve frozen every cent by now.
Flipping fuckwad on a shit stick!
“Brock?” The worry in DeAngelo’s tone was as heavy as a bag of boulders laying on my shoulders, as if there wasn’t enough weight there already.
How could this have happened? Who made it happen? Most importantly, why? First things first, Brock.
Inhaling deep and closing my eyes tight, I put the phone back to my ear. “Is there by any chance a client on the brokerage side of your business is missing exactly three million four hundred thousand dollars?”
“Brock,” he murmured, didn’t have to say another word.
The non-answer in his quiet tenor was all the evidence I needed that I was in the middle of a shitstorm with no clue how I got there.
I tugged on the mishmash lengths of short hair on my head with one hand. “Lo, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I promise you.”
“Don’t you think for a second that I think you did this,” he hissed fiercely. “I. Know. You. Right now, I just want you to go Hansel & Gretel or Paul Revere if you must. Buy a satellite phone with cash. I called you from my sat’s number. Take no other electronics. I’ll send other untraceable ones to you later. We’ll figure this out together.”
He wanted me to run like I was guilty. I think not, but I didn’t think that there would ever come a time in our lives when I needed to hear the word ‘together’ from him more. It was hella nice not to be in this shitstorm alone.
“Thanks for sticking by me, Lo, but I’m not going to our—”
“Don’t say it, Brock!” he bellowed, the different ranges his baritone was hitting in one conversation almost shocking. “I need you safe until we can figure this mess out. I’m positive we can’t trust just about everyone right now, even the legal system. Nina may have believed me about not knowing where you were because she knows me but she was also threatening me with aiding and abetting charges with a side of conspiracy before even asking where you were.”
Cabins upstate, I finished my sentence in my mind after being rudely interrupted. In my mind was a good place to keep everything if I didn’t want anyone who may be listening in on our chat to know where I was going. My line wasn’t secure, which mattered if I was going somewhere.
Nope. Certainly not upstate to the cabins we named Hansel & Gretel and Paul Revere as children. The latter was safer. Hansel & Gretel had to be falling down after years of disuse and care. It was left to our mother by her younger half-sister born of an extramarital affair no one besides family knew about and as far as I knew, the cabin was still in dead Aunt Jessie’s name.
Our mother gifted the place to me as a high school graduation present. She had no use for it especially during the winter time. Teenaged DeAngelo spent as much time as he could there with his friends whatever season. I was more likely to take just a woman with me, if I cared to vacation in the backside of the beyond. I didn’t care. Like my mother, I was self-diagnosed as allergic to the wild and uncivilized.
My philandering father, the outdoorsman when he wasn’t cheating, willed his modernized getaway cabin Paul Revere and its maintenance workers to my brother. DeAngelo Sr. had no one else to give it to. My mother divorced him when we were in middle school. I already had Hansel & Gretel, and wasn’t going to either cabin.
“Fine, Lo, I won’t say it, but I’m not the one to run from my problems. The legal system was our playground as children. We can handle this without me going on the lamb.” Even if working ‘together’ meant we’d likely get around to killing each other like we were before I left Devereaux’s.
Despite the threat of death, I didn’t leave DeAngelo to open my own firm until his had moral, competent people in place to watch his back. It looked like someone much more than competent, likely with a grudge to bear was stabbing us both in the back. Pulling our purse strings could ruin us both. Clients didn’t take too well to their money or someone else’s ending up in places it didn’t belong.
Not able to find fault with that, I started to pace. “Who is big mad enough to want to topple both companies and see me lose a good chunk of my freedom in the penal system? I can’t think of a single soul that pissed off. Okay, maybe I can. There’s a few women I broke ties with when things started to heat up on their end and cool off on mine.”
What part of ‘I don’t want a damn relationship until I was ready for one’ could they not, would not understand?
DeAngelo sighed. “I don’t care who’s big mad. I’ll be damned if you end up in a jail cell because someone has it out for you or me or both. And I don’t love ‘em and leave ‘em like you do, so yeah, if a broken heart or bruised ego started this, then this falls on you. All I know for sure is armed agents didn’t come to your home then here in the middle of the night to hear your side of things. As far as they’re concerned, you’re guilty. It’s not just that one big deposit either. There are small increments gone missing over the time you’ve been gone from Devereaux as well.”
Skidding to a stop in the middle of the stupid-large room, I snarled, “Increments over two whole years? How did your accountants miss that? My books add up. Well, until now, but me and my accountants go over them with a fine-tooth comb monthly to avoid the FBI showing up unwanted with arrest warrants.”
Two heartbeats passed before he responded, “That explains why the FBI was sent hot on your trail now; it’s the first of the month and you won’t go over anything behind bars but head first, ass up if you drop the soap.”
I cringed. “Seriously, Lo?”
“Seriously this, Brock, I’m thinking someone in my accounting department and yours is working together like we should be. It’ll take a miracle to make heads or tails of this shit before you’ve spent a significant amount of time behind said bars f
or no reason, and this is going to take more than my cool head and your micromanaging to fix. We need someone to dig into digital places they shouldn’t and find things most people miss.”
I had to give it to us; we were damn good attorneys, but not that damn good with computers. There seemed to be a lot of electronic collaborating going on. We were a thousand steps behind and would need the best to catch up.
“I’m guessing you have someone in mind, Lo.”
“I do,” he confirmed then screwed that up with, “I hope. I’ll find out for sure then send her your way or find someone else, but we have to do this my way.”
Of course, he’d endorse a woman snoop. No one pried better than a female looking for damning evidence.
“Lo, your way just makes me look like I have something to hide. Living anywhere in a Kentucky winter isn’t for the faint of heart. Plus, I didn’t take most of the shit Pops taught us seriously whereas you enjoyed it. I’d probably die trying to get out of Lexington without a driver.” Forget trying to get to the woods we dubbed In The Middle Of Nowhere, Kentucky. Frankfort, Kentucky to be precise.
Deangelo snorted. “Brock, you being overdramatic. You mastered the same things I did Pops taught us and might have enjoyed it too, if you hadn’t been trying to stick your thirteen-year-old little head in places it wasn’t ready for yet.”
I couldn’t dispute him; my flaws started with great smelling girls then women. “Have you smelled a female who bathed in lavender bubble bath and been around cookies all day? That’s like catnip to a kid and full grown man.”
“Only you.” He laughed. “You did love the girl scouts… until you discovered cheerleaders.”
Unable to help it, I grinned. “Best thing since sliced bread, but a nimble woman gets to me faster than cookies.”
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