Fire Brand

by Diana Palmer

  Which was why Sari and Paul Fiore, head of security for the Grayling Corporation, were such good friends. They’d known each other since Paul moved down from New Jersey to take the job, while Sari was in her last year of high school. Paul drove the girls to school every day.

  He’d wondered, but only to Sari, why her father hadn’t placed them both in private schools. Sari knew, but she didn’t dare say. It was because her father didn’t want them out of his sight, where they might say something that he didn’t approve of. They knew too much about him, about his business, about the way he treated animals and people.

  He was paranoid about his private life. He had women, Sari was certain of it, but never around the house. He had a mistress. She worked for the federal government. Paul had told her, in confidence. He wasn’t afraid of Darwin Grayling—Paul wasn’t afraid of anyone. But he liked his job and he didn’t want to go back to the FBI. He’d worked for the Bureau years ago. Nobody knew why he’d suddenly given up a lucrative government job to become a rent-a-cop for a Texas millionaire in a small town at the back of beyond. Paul never said, either.

  Sari touched Merrie’s slightly bruised cheek and winced. “I warned you about talking back, honey,” she said worriedly. “I’m so sorry!”

  “My mouth and my brain don’t stay connected,” Merrie laughed, but bitterly. Her blue eyes met her sister’s. “If we could just tell somebody!”

  “We could, and Daddy would make sure they never worked again,” Sari said. “That’s why I’ve never told Paul anything...” She bit her lip.

  But Merrie knew already. She hugged the taller girl. “I won’t tell him. I know how you feel about Paul.”

  “I wish he felt something for me,” Sari said with a long sigh. “He’s always been affectionate with me. He takes good care of me. But it’s... I don’t know how to say it. Impersonal?” She drew away, her expression sad. “He just doesn’t get close to people. He dated that out-of-town auditor two years ago, remember? She called here over and over, and he wouldn’t talk to her. He said he just wanted someone to go to the movies with, and she was looking at wedding rings.” She laughed involuntarily. She shook her head. “He won’t get involved.”

  “Maybe he was involved, and something happened,” her sister said softly. “He looks like the sort of person who dives into things headfirst. You know, all or nothing. Maybe he lost somebody he loved, Sari.”

  “I guess that would explain a lot.” She moved away, grimacing. “It’s just my luck, to go loopy over a man who thinks a special relationship is something you have with a vehicle.”

  “It’s a very nice vehicle,” Merrie began.

  “It’s a truck, Merrie!” she interrupted, throwing up her hands. “Gosh, you’d think it was a child the way he takes care of it. Special mats, taking it to the car wash once a week. He even waxes it himself.” She glowered. “It’s a truck!”

  “I like trucks,” Merrie said. “That cowboy who worked for us last year had a fancy black one. He wanted to take me to a movie.” She shivered. “I thought Daddy was going to kill him.”

  “So did I.” Sari swallowed, hard. She wrapped her arms around her chest. “The cowboy went all the way to Arizona, they said, to make sure Daddy didn’t have him followed. He was scared.”

  “So was I,” Merrie confessed. “You know, I’m eighteen years old and I’ve never gone on a date with a real boy. I’ve never been kissed, except on the cheek.”

  “Join the club,” her sister laughed softly. “Well, one day we’ll break out of here. We’ll escape!” she said dramatically. “I’ll hire a team of mercenaries to hide us from Daddy!”

  “With what money?” Merrie asked sadly. “Neither of us has a dime. Daddy makes sure we can’t even get a part-time job to make money. You can’t even live at your college campus. I’ll bet that gets you talked about.”

  “It does,” Sari confided. “But they figure our father is just eccentric because he’s so rich, and they let it go. I don’t have any real friends, anyway.”

  “Just me,” Merrie teased.

  Sari hugged her. “Just you. You’re my best friend, Merrie.”

  “You’re mine, too, even if you are my sister.”

  Sari drew back. “One day, things will change.”

  “You’ve been saying that since we were in grammar school. It hasn’t.”

  “It will.”

  Merrie touched her cheek and winced. “I told Paul I fell down the steps,” she said, when she noticed her sister’s worried expression.

  “I wonder if he believed you,” Sari replied solemnly. “He’s not afraid of Daddy.”

  “He should be. I’ve heard Daddy has this friend back East,” Merrie told her. “He’s in with some underworld group. They say he’s killed people, that he’ll do anything for money.” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t want Paul hurt any more than you do. The less he knows about what goes on here when he’s off duty, the better. He couldn’t save us, anyway. He could only be dragged down with us.”

  “He wouldn’t let Daddy hurt us, if he knew,” Sari replied.

  “So he won’t know.”

  “Someone else might tell him,” Sari began.

  “Not anybody who works here,” Merrie sighed. “Mandy’s kept house for over twenty years, since before you were born. She knows stuff, but she’s afraid to tell. She has a brother who does illegal things. Daddy told her he could have her brother sent to prison if she ever opened her mouth. She’s afraid of him.” She looked up. “I’m afraid of him.”

  Sari winced. “Yes. Me, too.”

  “I don’t ever want to get married, Sari,” the younger woman said huskily. “Not ever!”

  “One day, you might, if the right man comes along.”

  Merrie laughed. “He’s not likely to come along while Daddy’s around, or he’ll be leaving in a body bag in the back of a pickup truck.”

  The dark humor in that statement sent them both into gales of laughter.

  * * *

  Paul Fiore was Italian. He also had a Greek grandmother. It accounted for his olive complexion and thick, jet-black hair and large brown eyes. He was handsome, too, tall and broad-shouldered, muscular without making a point of it. He walked like a panther, light on his feet, and he had a quick mind. He’d been in law enforcement most of his life until he took the job with the Grayling Corporation. He’d wanted to get as far away from federal work—and New Jersey—as he could. Jacobsville, Texas, came close to his ideal place.

  He was fond of the girls, Merrie and Sari, and he took charge of the house when Mr. Grayling was out of the country. He could handle any problem that came up. His main responsibility was to keep the girls safe, but he also kept a close watch on the property, especially the very expensive Thoroughbreds Grayling raised for sale.

  The housekeeper, Mandy Swilling, was fond of him. She was always baking him the cinnamon cookies he liked so much, and tucking little surprises into his truck when he had to be away on business.

  “You’ve got me ruined,” he accused her one morning. “I’ll be so spoiled that I’ll never be able to get along in the world if I ever get fired from here.”

  “Mr. Darwin will never fire you,” Mandy said confidently. “You keep your mouth shut and you don’t ask questions.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Odd reason to keep a man on, isn’t it?”

  “Not around here,” she said heavily.

  He stared at her, his dark eyes twinkling. “You know where all the bodies are buried, huh? That why you still have work?”

  She didn’t laugh, as he’d expected her to. She just glanced at him and winced. “Don’t even joke about things like that, Mr. Paul.”

  He groaned at her form of addressing him.

  “Now, now,” she said. “I’ve always called the boss Mr. Darwin, just like I call the foreman M
r. Edward. It’s a way of speaking that Southern folk are raised with. You, being a Yankee...” She stopped and grinned. “Sorry. I meant to say, you, being a northerner, wouldn’t know about that.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You still sound like a person born up North.”

  He shrugged and grinned back at her. “We are what we are.”

  “I suppose so.”

  He watched her work at making rolls for lunch. She wasn’t much to look at. She was about fifty pounds overweight, had short silver hair and dark eyes, and she was slightly stooped over from years of working in gardens with a hoe. But she could cook! The woman was a magician in the kitchen. Paul remembered his tiny little grandmother, making ravioli and antipasto when he was a child, the scent of flour and oil that always seemed to cling to her. Kitchens were comforting to a child who had no real home. His father had worked for a local mob boss, and done all sorts of illegal things, like most of the rest of his family. His mother had died miserable, watching her husband run around with an endless parade of other women, shuddering every time the big boss or law enforcement came to the front door. After his mother died and his father went to jail for the twentieth time, Paul went to live with his little Greek grandmother. He and his cousin Mikey had stayed with her until they were almost grown. Paul watched Mikey go the same route his father had, attached like a tick to the local big crime boss. His father never came around. In fact, he couldn’t remember seeing his father more than a dozen times before the man died in a shootout with a rival mob.

  It was why he’d gone into law enforcement at seventeen, fresh out of high school. He hated the hold crime had on his family. He hoped he could make a difference, help clean up his old neighborhood and free it from the talons of organized crime. He went from local police right up into the FBI. He’d felt that he was unstoppable, that he could fight crime and win. Pride had blinded him to the reality of life. It had cost him everything.

  Still, he missed the Bureau sometimes. But the memories had been lethal. He couldn’t face them, not even now, years after the tragedy that had sent him running from New Jersey to Texas on a job tip from a coworker. He’d given up dreams of a home and all the things that went with it. Now, it was just the job, doing the job. He didn’t look forward. Ever. One Day at a Time was his credo.

  “Why are you hiding in here?” Mandy asked suddenly, breaking into his thoughts.

  “It’s that obvious, huh?” he asked, the New Jersey accent still prevalent even after the years he’d spent in Texas.

  “Yes, it is.”

  He sipped the black coffee she’d placed in front of him at the table. “Livestock foreman’s got a daughter. She came with him today.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mandy replied.

  He shrugged. “I took her to lunch at Barbara’s Cafe a few weeks ago. Just a casual thing. I met her at the courthouse. She works there. She decided that I was looking for a meaningful relationship. So now she’s over here every Saturday like clockwork, hanging out with her dad.”

  “That will end when Mr. Darwin comes back,” she said with feeling. “He doesn’t like strangers on the place, even strangers related to people who work here.”

  He smiled sadly. “Or it will end when I lose my temper and start cursing in Italian.”

  “You look Italian,” she said, studying him.

  He chuckled. “You should see my cousin Mikey. He could have auditioned for The Godfather. I’ve got Greek in me, too. My grandmother was from a little town near Athens. She could barely speak English at all. But could she cook! Kind of like you,” he added with twinkling eyes. “She’d have liked you, Mandy.”

  Her hard face softened. “You never speak of your parents.”

  “I try not to think about them too much. Funny, how we carry our childhoods around on our backs.”

  She nodded. She was making rolls for lunch and they had to have time to rise. Her hands were floury as she kneaded the soft dough. She nodded toward the rest of the house. “Neither of those poor girls has had a childhood. He keeps them locked up all the time. No parties, no dancing and especially no boys.”

  He scowled. “I noticed that. I asked the boss once why he didn’t let the girls go out occasionally.” He took a sip of his coffee.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That the last employee who asked him that question is now waiting tables in a little town in the Yukon Territory.”

  She shook her head. “That’s probably true. A cowboy who tried to take Merrie out on a date once got a job in Arizona. They say he’s still looking behind him for hired assassins.” Her hands stilled in the dough. “Don’t you ever mention that outside the house,” she advised. “Or to Mr. Darwin. I kind of like having you around,” she added with a smile and went back to her chore.

  “I like this job. No big-city noise, no pressure, no pressing deadlines on cases.”

  She glanced up at him, then back down to the bowl again. “We’ve never talked about it, but you were in law enforcement once, weren’t you?”

  He scowled. “How did you know that?”

  “Small towns. Cash Grier let something slip to a friend, who told Barbara at the café, who told her cook, who told me.”

  “Our police chief knew I was in law enforcement? How?” he wondered aloud, feeling insecure. He didn’t want his past widely known here.

  She laughed softly. “Nobody knows how he finds out things. But he worked for the government once.” She glanced at him. “He was a high-level assassin.”

  His eyes widened. “The police chief?” he exclaimed.

  She nodded. “Then he was a Texas Ranger—that ended when he slugged the temporary captain and got fired. Afterward he worked for the DA in San Antonio and then he came here.”

  He whistled. “Slugged the captain.” He chuckled. “He’s still a pretty tough customer, despite the gorgeous wife and two little kids.”

  “That’s what everyone says. We’re pretty protective of him. Our late mayor—who was heavily into drug smuggling on the side—tried to fire Chief Grier, and the whole city police force and fire department, and all our city employees, said they’d quit on the spot if he did.”

  “Obviously he wasn’t fired.”

  She smiled. “Not hardly. It turns out that the state attorney general, Simon Hart, is Cash Grier’s cousin. He showed up, along with some reporters, at the hearing they had to discuss the firing of the chief’s patrol officers. They arrested a drunk politician and he told the mayor to fire them. The chief said over his dead body.”

  “I’ve been here for years, and I heard gossip about it, but that’s the first time I’ve heard the whole story.”

  “An amazing man, our chief.”

  “Oh, yes.” He finished his coffee. “Nobody makes coffee like you do, Mandy. Never weak and pitiful, always strong and robust!”

  “Yes, and the coffee usually comes out that way, too!” she said with a wicked grin.

  He laughed as he got up from the table, and went back to work.

  * * *

  That night he was researching a story about an attempted Texas Thoroughbred kidnapping on the internet when Sari walked in the open door. He was perched on the bed in just his pajama bottoms with the laptop beside him. Sari had on a long blue cotton nightgown with a thick, ruffled matching housecoat buttoned way up to the throat. She jumped onto the bed with him, her long hair in a braid, her eyes twinkling as she crossed her legs under the voluminous garment.

  “Do that when your dad comes home, and we’ll both be sitting on the front lawn with the door locked,” he teased.

  “You know I never do it when he’s home. What are you looking up?”

  “Remember that story last week about the so-called traveling horse groomer who turned up at the White Stables in Lexington, Kentucky, and walked off with a Thoroughbred in
the middle of the night?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, just in case he headed south when he jumped bail, I’m checking out similar attempts. I found one in Texas that happened two weeks ago. So I’m reading about his possible MO.”

  She frowned. “MO?”

  “Modus operandi,” he said. “It’s Latin. It means...”

  “Please,” she said. “I know Latin. It means method of operation.”

  “Close enough,” he said with a gentle smile. His eyes went back to the computer screen. “Generally speaking, once a criminal finds a method that works, he uses it over and over until he’s caught. I want to make sure that he doesn’t sashay in here while your dad’s gone and make off with Grayling’s Pride.”

  “Sashay?” she teased.

  He wrinkled his nose. “You’re a bad influence on me,” he mused, his eyes still on the computer screen. “That’s one of your favorite words.”

  “It’s just a useful one. Snit is my favorite one.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “And lately you’re in a snit more than you’re not,” she pointed out.

  He managed a smile. “Bad memories. Anniversaries hit hard.”

  She bit her tongue. She’d never discussed really personal things with him. She’d tried once and he’d closed up immediately. So she smiled impersonally. “So they say,” she said instead of posing the question she was dying to.

  He admired her tact. He didn’t say so, of course. She couldn’t know the memories that tormented him, that had him up walking the floor late at night. She couldn’t know the guilt that ate at him night and day because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when it really mattered.

  “Are you okay?” she asked suddenly.

  His dark eyebrows went up. “What?”

  She shrugged. “You looked wounded just then.”

  She was more perceptive than he’d realized. He scrolled down the story he was reading online. “Wounded. Odd choice of words there, Isabel.”