Rebel Love (Kings of Corruption Book 2)

by Michelle St. James

  “I think that’s oversimplifying things, don’t you?” her mother asked. “You didn’t really get the opportunity to see if it would work out.”

  “He showed me who he was by lying,” Elle said.

  “He was little more than a boy,” her mother said. “He loved you. He clearly hated what his parents did and didn’t know how to tell you. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s not as if he’s the one who shut down the store.”

  It made sense, but it didn’t change the pit of grief that had been stewing inside her since the day she found out about his parents. She’d known he was rich. Had known he’d chosen a state school as a way to avoid the privileged masses at Stanford or Princeton. But she hadn’t known his parents were the people behind Hathaway Holding until after her father’s death when he had come to her, tortured by everything that had happened, and told her everything.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said.

  Her mother finished off her wine. “Maybe it is.”

  “Jesus, Mom!” Elle said. “Do you want to call him and set up a date?”

  She stood, started clearing dishes from the table. Her mother put a hand on Elle’s wrist to stop her.

  “It’s not about me,” her mother said. “The question is, what do you want?”

  Elle pulled her hand away, stacked their plates, carried them into the house without answering. But the question lingered in her mind through dessert and coffee, as she made the drive back to her apartment near the store.

  How was it possible her mother could forgive Lachlan for what he’d done, or more specifically, what he hadn’t told them? Because the lie had been a betrayal of them all — her parents and Patrick too. They had grown to like him, had spent hours discussing books and politics over long dinners outside, had taken them both to lunch or dinner when they came to campus to visit.

  She searched inside herself, looking frantically for the familiar well of pain and anger that had sustained her in the wake of her father’s death. That had prompted her to work two jobs while saving for the new store. That had given her strength to sign the lease, risk her money, her credit. That had kept her warm during all the nights she’d slept alone.

  It was there, but it felt further away than usual, an oasis in the distance rather than a bottomless abyss stretching its jaws for her. Something else had appeared in its place, something closer and more urgent: the memory of Lachlan sitting across from her at the Bean, studying her the way he always had — with interest, admiration, curiosity.

  Desire.

  That was what she’d seen on his face, the thing that had filled her with warmth, made her feel like the blood was moving through her body for the first time in years.

  He still wanted her.

  But that wasn’t enough. She thought of her mother, the question she’d asked after dinner.

  The question is, what do you want?

  8

  Locke was still thinking about her Sunday night when he reached into the cooler on the terrace and pulled out a beer. The moon was high and full, a column of light on the water below. He wondered where Elle was, wondered if she could see it, too. It made him feel closer to her, like they were still part of the same universe even though he knew it would never be true again. Their meeting the day before had been a kind of miracle, a chance at that mysterious thing called closure that people seemed to prize so much.

  Except he didn’t want fucking closure with Elle Matheson.

  He wanted her back.

  The words from her favorite book drifted to him on the breeze.

  You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.

  It was from The Little Prince. He remembered how shocked she’d been when she heard he hadn’t read it. She’d bought him a copy the next day, and he’d devoured it, looking for clues to the enigmatic woman who seemed both a great mystery and one of the simplest, purest things of beauty he’d ever known.

  “You composing poetry over there or are you going to bring us one of those beers?”

  The question pulled him from his reverie, and he turned to face the people at the table behind him, all of them either behind a computer or huddled over papers held down with beers and plates of food so they didn’t blow away in the wind. The patio heaters blazed around them, cocooning them from the increasingly chilly night air.

  “Do I look like a maid?” He walked back to take his seat at the head of the table. “Get it yourself.”

  “You’re a real dick, you know that?” Colton Pearce said to his left.

  “It’s one of my more redeeming qualities,” Locke said, laughing.

  Pearce had joined the operation three years earlier after his sister’s stalker had been released from jail only to try and kill her less than twenty-four hours later. It had been an open-and-shut case until the cop who arrested him forgot to read him hi Miranda rights. The case was thrown out after that, and Pearce's sister went into hiding in a small town — arranged by Locke — until they’d brought the asshole down. Colton had been with him ever since, trying to even the scales for other people like his sister, now married to a mild-mannered web developer with a toddler.

  “So you’ve mentioned,” Pearce said.

  “This guy is a real piece of work.”

  Locke followed the voice across the table where Braden Kane sat next to Nora Murphy. If anyone had told him six months ago he would have not one but two former FBI agents on his team, he would have called them a liar. But Kane proven himself on their operation to take back money from a bank that had foreclosed on thousands of homeowners after claiming to lose the paperwork they’d submitted for loan modification.

  Nora had been an even bigger surprise.

  It wasn’t just that she had saved his life during their sting against a dirty Fed that had been her friend; she’d also proven herself to be tough and capable, and she’d brought warm edges to the group that he would have denied they needed before she joined them.

  “You talking about Glover?” Colton said.

  “Who else?” said Braden, still looking at the screen.

  “Did you see he shut down the pension program on the employees at his last company?” Nora asked, leaning over Braden to read, her hand on his thigh.

  “That’s not the worst thing he’s done,” Locke said. “Did you read the background?”

  Nora straightened in her chair, shuffled the papers in front of her. “The part about his possible connections to the trafficking of girls in Indonesia?”

  “That would be the one,” Locke said.

  “He’s a real prince,” Nora said, throwing the papers down in disgust.

  Braden reached over, took her hand as he continued scrolling. Locke envied them. He could’t remember what it felt like to be himself with someone. He had been himself with Elle, but he wasn’t that person anymore, and it was hard to imagine Elle Matheson being okay with the way he made his living.

  He could never lie to her again. That much he knew for sure. He was relieved she hadn’t asked about his current line of work, had hoped she assumed he retired on the proceeds from his company. Maybe she thought he was traveling and taking it easy. Maybe she thought he was providing capital for other young companies.

  He didn’t know, but the one and only upside to the fact that he would never see her again was the fact that he wouldn’t have to wrestle with how and when to tell her about the mercenary organization he’d funded through the sale of his company.

  He didn’t even try to pretend the trade-off was worth it.

  Besides, if Nora Murphy, a former FBI agent, could understand the value in what they did, anything was possible.

  He pushed the thought aside. It was too tempting. Too distracting.

  “There’s more than enough dirt on Glover to make him our next target,” Locke said.

  Nora took a drink of her beer. “Agreed. He’s slippery, too. The odds of the Feds getting onto him anytime soon are slim, and even if they had enough to bring charges against him, Glover would probably
just cue up a bench of pricy lawyers and bury the courts in technicalities.”

  Locke nodded. The people at the table were only half of the core group he’d come to think of as an altruistic mercenary organization. Their talents weren’t for hire; they chose their targets through lengthy and careful research, selected them based on the crimes they’d committed against the innocent, the odds against their ever being brought to justice through traditional channels.

  He’d come to the business through a circuitous route of monetary donations, activism, and private persuasion that had eventually led him to the truth; sometimes you had to break the rules to get something done.

  It would have been easy to blame his parents. To call what they’d done to the Mathesons and countless people before them the genesis of his idea.

  But that was only part of the story.

  In the grand scheme of things, his parents were just flies in the ointment of civilized society. He didn’t sanction their business practices, but they were legal.

  And yet they’d opened his eyes, made him see how many people used their money and power to hurt those who couldn’t fight back. It had started there, but it turned out corruption had many forms. Businesses could be corrupt, but so could law enforcement agencies. Some people had corrupt souls, something dark and twisted inside them that made them hurt other people.

  Locke didn't discriminate. Where personal corruption met legal incompetence or judicial apathy, he stepped in. Where corporate corruption met regulation that didn’t protect the citizen, he stepped in. Where legal corruption met internal cover-up, he stepped in.

  His only litmus test was whether someone innocent had been irreparably harmed.

  “I’ll talk to Derek when he gets back from Bali,” Locke said. He looked at Braden. “You want to contact Archie through the portal?”

  “Will do,” Braden said.

  Locke went to great lengths to ensure their organization was safe from prying eyes. His counter measures included hidden communications portals on the internet and daily surveillance sweeps of the property that he conducted himself, plus several shell companies that hid his assets, including the house on the cliff in La Jolla and more than one offshore bank account with the money from the sale of his company.

  He didn’t take a profit from anything they did in the name of justice, and everyone who worked for him agreed to be paid only a fraction of their take — if there was one. The rest of whatever they stole went back to the people who’d been stolen from.

  It was how he liked it, the only way he could justify what he did, because there was another truth he’d only come to admit to himself after years of taking people down.

  He liked it.

  He liked not having to follow anyone’s rules but his own. He liked knowing he was changing something when it sometimes felt like nothing ever changed, like the world was fighting the same battles it had been fighting a hundred years earlier but with more sophisticated tools. Like it would be fighting them again a hundred years from now.

  He liked having an outlet for the recklessness that had long ago morphed from charming into what some saw as an alarming need for adrenaline. He didn’t have to push the boundaries when they took someone down.

  It was just an added bonus.

  He surrounded himself with others who didn’t mind the risk, although most of them had enough sense to occasionally question him about the specifics. People tended to get detail-oriented when it came to a chute opening 12,000 feet in the air or a base jump that was a little too close to the ground for comfort.

  Most of them opted out of the more dangerous elements. He didn’t mind. There was plenty of work to go around.

  He thought of Elle, wondered if he would have become less reckless if he’d been able to keep her in his life.

  You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.

  He used to think she would try to tame him. She never did, and now he could only wish she’d tried. Maybe it would have kept her with him.

  But as he looked out over the water, he knew it was just wishful thinking. Nothing would have kept her with him. Not after what he’d done. Elle had no responsibility to him.Then or now.

  But that didn’t stop him from wanting her.

  9

  “What did you pick today, Abby?” Elle smiled across the counter at the little girl with brown pigtails as she slid a picture book up onto the counter.

  “Llama, Llama, Red Pajama,” she said, her eyes bright with excitement.

  “One of my favorites,” Elle said. “You must have liked Llama, Llama, Mad at Mama.”

  Abby and her parents, Jason and Eileen, had been coming into the store since it opened, and Elle was always excited to offer recommendations of her favorite picture books to the little girl, clearly an avid reader-in-the-making.

  “That one was a hit with Abby,” Jason said. He removed his wallet while Elle rang up the book. “Not to mention Eileen.”

  Elle laughed. “Books solve all kinds of problems, don’t they?”

  She wrapped the book in brown paper and slid it inside a bag. Then she took his credit card, rang up the purchase, and gave him a receipt.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing your book review, Abby.”

  Abby giggled and picked up the bag with one still-pudgy hand.

  “Thanks, Elle,” Jason said. “See you next time.”

  She smiled and waved, his words making her feel a little better. See? Just because Bolton’s was going to sell more books didn’t mean her customers would buy there. She just needed to have a little faith in what she’d built, in what she was still building.

  “If you build it, they will come,” she murmured aloud as the bell on the door announced their exit.

  She was clearing space on the counter when the bell rang again. She looked up expecting to see Zach for their Monday lunch, but it was a youngish man in a navy blue jacket and a baseball cap that somehow looked official.

  “Hello,” Elle said, smiling. “How can I help you?”

  He looked at a small brown package in his hand. “Elle Matheson?”

  “I’m Elle Matheson.”

  “I have a delivery for you,” he said, stepping farther into the store.

  “Oh, okay.”

  He pulled out an iPad and handed it to her. “Sign with your finger on the line.”

  She followed his instructions and he handed her the package.

  “Who is it from?” she asked, turning the package over in her hands. When she looked up he was gone, her question met by the sound of the bell on the door as he left. “Alrighty, then.”

  There was no return address on the package, and she slipped her finger under one of the taped flaps and peeled off the brown paper. Her heart nearly stopped beating when she took in the cover, faded and yellowing, the jacket still intact.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Le Petit Prince

  The image of a boy standing at the edge of a planet surrounded by flowers and stars was intimately familiar to her, but she knew even before opening the cover that this was no ordinary copy of her favorite book.

  She knew booksellers who wouldn’t touch it without gloves, but she wasn’t that kind of bookseller. She wasn’t interested in the resale value of the book. She just wanted to look at it. To feel the old paper between her fingers.

  To marvel at it.

  She opened the cover and her eyes fell on a slip of paper, the handwriting slanting across its surface as well-known to her now as it had been eight years before when she’d been a sophomore in college madly, deeply in love for the first — the only — time in her life.

  Time and distance changes nothing…

  L

  Her heart hammered in her chest. When she turned to the copyright page she was unsurprised to find it was a French first edition.

  She closed the cover quickly, as if that would somehow trap all the feelings welling up inside her like a storm.

  She wouldn't deny that she’d been think
ing about him. It wasn’t just the conversation with her mother the night before; he’d been haunting her ever since their accidental meeting, every moment of their passionate love affair coming back to her in painful and exquisite detail. Except now there wasn’t just the past to tempt her but the future.

  Had they met for a reason? Was it possible to start again? To forget everything that had happened?

  They were pointless questions. Letting go of pain was healthy and productive, but it didn’t mean setting yourself up to be hurt all over again. You could be a forgiving person and still protect yourself. Wasn’t that part of growing up? Learning not to touch the flame after being burned the first time?

  She jumped as the bell on the door rang, half-expecting another package that would only elicit more complex emotions. But when she looked up it was Zach, carrying a brown paper bag and making his way around the tables stacked with books.

  “Sorry I’m late.” He set the bag on the counter. “Brad was working again, and you know how he always chats me up.” He froze. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, tried to smile as she started unpacking sandwiches and sides from Milton’s. “Nothing. And Brad has been crushing on you since he started a year ago. You should be used to the attention by now.”

  “You are such a liar,” Zach said, pulling a stool over to the counter where they always shared their Monday lunch.

  It had started as a way to brainstorm marketing strategy; being a small business wasn’t easy, even in a community that did more than most to support them. But their business lunches had quickly turned into coffee klatches between friends. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d talked meaningfully about business.

  She wiped her hands on a napkin, just to be safe, and pushed the book toward him. “This was delivered right before you got here.”

  He looked down at it suspiciously. “Can I touch it?”

  She handed him a napkin. “Wipe your hands first.”

  He sighed, wiped his hands on the napkin, then picked up the book.

  “Are you taking up French?” He turned it over in his hands before returning to the front and opening the cover. “Time and distance changes nothing?” He looked up at her. “Is this from the hottie you were having coffee with last week?”