Coldhearted

by Beverly Barton

  The Powell Agency had arranged for a car to pick up Rick and Jordan at the airstrip where Rick had landed the helicopter. The driver, a six-four, muscular guy with a military bearing, introduced himself only as Hart. Rick knew that Griffin Powell had friends in high places, both in D.C. and around the world and therefore the agency had advantageous contacts just about everywhere. Other than informing Rick that he would be at their service while they were in D.C., Hart didn’t say much else, simply opened the rear door of the black Lincoln and stood at attention while they slipped into the backseat and settled in for the drive to Bethesda.

  Jordan was as nervous as the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. She had fidgeted on the flight to D.C. and even now she anxiously worked her hands together and glanced from one side window to the other. When her cell phone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin. Luckily, before they’d taken off from Price Manor, one of the sheriff’s deputies had found her phone not far from where Maleah had been shot. Rick figured that Devon Markham was calling her again.

  “It’s not Devon,” she told Rick, as if she’d known what he was thinking. “It’s Wesley.” She frowned. “I knew it was only a matter of time before he called once he saw this week’s issue of The Chatterbox.”

  “Want me to talk to him?” Rick asked.

  She shook her head, flipped open her phone, and said, “Hi, Wes.”

  Rick could figure out what Jordan’s stepson was saying by listening to her responses. She assured him that she was all right and for Kendra and him not to worry.

  “Rick—Mr. Carson—and I are in D.C. and on our way to the townhouse to pick up Devon and take him back to Priceville,” Jordan said. “No, absolutely not. You and Kendra are to stay in school.”

  She listened to his reply, and then told him, “I know you’ll both have to endure some unpleasant comments from ignorant people, but—what!” She held her phone to her chest as she turned to Rick. “Wes and Kendra are being harassed by reporters. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that would probably happen.”

  Rick held out his hand for her phone. She hesitated, and then turned it over to him.

  “Wes, this is Rick Carson. I’m going to arrange for a Powell agent to come down there to Auburn for you and another to go to Athens for Kendra. They’ll serve as your bodyguards and handle the press.”

  “Send someone to Kendra first,” Wes said. “She’s holed up in her dorm room, afraid to even go to classes.”

  “Call her and tell her that we’ll get a female agent to her ASAP, someone who can be with her twenty-four/seven. The agency will contact the proper authorities at your school and hers.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you. And thank you for looking after Jordan.”

  “No problem,” Rick said. “Do you want to talk to Jordan again?”

  “Yes, sir. Please.”

  He handed Jordan the phone. She offered him an appreciative smile.

  Immediately, he put in a call to Griffin and requested two agents for Jordan’s stepchildren and explained the situation. Griff assured him that Powell’s would take care of everything. Just as he ended his conversation with his boss, he heard Jordan finishing hers with Wesley.

  “Everything is going to be okay. We’ll weather this storm together, as a family. Just stay put. Help’s on the way. And call me as often as you want, and tell Kendra to do the same.”

  Jordan closed her phone, opened the side flap on her small shoulder bag, and dropped the phone inside. “This is going to be difficult for the kids. You have no idea how much I hate that they have to go through this nightmare with me. It was bad enough when my good name was slandered in the press, but now this. The kids have always adored Devon. He’s been like an uncle to them. And they thought the world of Dan.”

  “They knew the truth, didn’t they?” Rick asked.

  “Yes, of course. Before Dan and I were married, Dan, Devon, and I sat down with the children and explained the situation. They weren’t babies. Kendra was fifteen and Wes seventeen at the time. Young people these days know a lot more about the world and its complexities than we did at their age.”

  “Didn’t anyone in your little family circle voice a few objections? Wasn’t anyone concerned that you were making a mistake?”

  “You don’t approve of what I did, do you?”

  “What you did is really none of my business, is it? But you’ve got to admit that your arrangement with Dan and Devon was unorthodox to say the least.”

  “It suited us,” she said.

  “Did it really?”

  She stared at him, the look on her face a mixture of surprise and resentment. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Good, because I don’t. Daniel Price might have been a great guy, but his whole life was a lie. And before you jump down my throat about not understanding what it was like for him to be politically ambitious and know that him being gay would prevent him from running for president, I’ll admit that I don’t understand. But I do know that for whatever reason a person tells that first big lie, they have to continue lying. There’s no escape. They’re trapped. And Dan Price trapped Devon and you along with him.”

  Jordan didn’t reply immediately, she simply looked at him with those beautiful blue-gray eyes as if searching inside him for something she needed. That look rattled him. Had his soapbox speech done more harm than good?

  “You’re right,” she finally said. “I married Dan for Devon’s sake and also because I hoped that a marriage in name only would protect me. I had been in love and I had been married before and both times, I had been deeply hurt. I never wanted to experience that kind of pain again.”

  He didn’t know how to respond. He’d spent most of his life avoiding commitment, determined to never let a woman do to him what his stepmother had done to his father. If you didn’t love, you weren’t vulnerable. You didn’t make stupid mistakes.

  Damned if he and Jordan didn’t share a common fear. Neither of them wanted to be hurt.

  “Actually, I get it,” Rick told her.

  “I thought you might.” She leaned her head back against the leather seat and closed her eyes.

  For the remainder of the ride to the Price townhouse, neither he nor Jordan said a word. After all, what was there to say?

  * * *

  Her mind drifted back to another time and place, to a man who had posed a threat to them. She had done what was necessary and she had no regrets.

  Donald Farris was a very unpleasant man. She had disliked him the first time they met, but she had made allowances for him for Jordan’s sake. After all, he was her boss and her future at the Peachtree Agency had been in his hands. Why Jordan had chosen to forgo her dreams of teaching was something only she knew. Jordan would have been a wonderful teacher, just as she would have been a wonderful wife and mother. But now that she was working her way up the ladder at the PR agency, she seemed content—almost happy—for the first time since Robby Joe died. And then that nitwit Farris had done the unthinkable and promoted Paul Dueitt to junior VP, a job everyone knew should have been Jordan’s. Even the owner of the agency questioned his choice, but had upheld his decision, then promised Jordan she was next in line.

  Well, next in line was not good enough. Jordan deserved that job as junior VP. Actually she should have Farris’s job. Getting rid of Paul was an option she had quickly dismissed. He was a very nice young man with a wife and two children. Besides, Jordan’s unhappiness wasn’t his fault. It was Donald Farris’s fault. He had hurt Jordan. He stood in the way of her happiness. There was only one thing to do—get rid of him.

  She had spent weeks studying his daily routine and forming a plan. Farris was thirty-five, vain and arrogant. He was health conscious to the point of being obsessed with staying fit. Morning and evening, when everyone else at the Peachtree Agency took the elevator to the fifth floor suite, Donald Farris took the stairs. On Wednesday evenings, he usually worked late and was often the last to leave the office. And that’s why this Wednesday evening, she
lay in wait, intending to follow him. Once she knew for sure that they were alone, she would make her move.

  There he is. Look at him. Such a cocky son of a bitch. Mr. Aren’t-I-Important written all over his swagger and smirking grin. If she had her way, after today, he wouldn’t swagger or smirk ever again.

  As soon as he opened the door that led to the stairwell, she checked the hallway to make sure no one else was anywhere around. Not a soul in sight. She made her way to the door, opened it, and went inside. Inhaling and exhaling a deep breath to steady her hands and calm her nerves, she followed him. The sound of her footsteps was drowned out by Donald Farris’s expensive leather loafers tapping rapidly against the concrete stairs. She had to make her move soon before he reached the lower levels. And it had to be a sneak attack or as close to a sneak attack as she could achieve.

  She all but ran from the fifth floor to the fourth, catching up with him halfway between the fourth and the third. He had to know he wasn’t alone, but he didn’t slow his pace or even look back to see who was following him. Although he was, as far as she knew, the only Peachtree Agency employee who regularly used the stairs, he wasn’t the only person in the building who did. Apparently he was accustomed to others occasionally taking the stairs.

  When she came up directly behind him, practically breathing down his neck, he glanced over his shoulder and gave her an odd look, no doubt recognizing her. He started to say something, but she didn’t give him the time to speak. With him staring at her, she lifted her palms and, using them as weapons, shoved them into his chest with all her might. Losing his balance, he stumbled backward.

  She had caught him off guard. She had the advantage.

  When he stared at her, his eyes wide with shock, she smiled.

  When he tried to grab the railing to steady himself, she gave him another hard shove, hoping to push him down the stairs. But instead, his feet slipped out from under him and he hit the guard rail. Grasping in thin air for some-thing—anything—to break his fall, he panicked. She used his fear against him and as his back hit the rail and one foot remained in the air, she pounced on him. He tried to latch on to her, but his hands slipped away from the leather jacket she wore and he toppled backward and over the railing.

  His terrified scream echoed through the enclosure, but she was the only one who heard his dying shriek. She stood on the stairs, looked down over the guard rail and watched him as he soared, head first, down, down, down…His body hit the concrete floor at the first level with a resounding thud.

  She smiled, brushed her hands together in a that’s-that gesture, and walked down the stairs. She maneuvered around his splattered body, being careful not to step in the blood or gore, and without a moment’s regret went down to the basement parking deck. Once safely in her car, she glanced at herself in the rearview mirror above the console. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright and she was still smiling.

  What an exhilarating experience! She had just killed a man and no one would ever know. She laughed. The bastard deserved exactly what he got. He had made the mistake of making an enemy of them, her and Jordan.

  Hart slowed the Lincoln to a standstill a block away from the townhouse.

  “The police have cordoned off the street,” Hart said. He tapped the earphone in his left ear. “I’m being told that there will be no easy way to get you into the house. The police are keeping the news crews away from the front door and there’s a police officer posted at the back entrance, but front or back, we’re facing making our way through a mob of reporters and protestors.”

  “Protestors?” Jordan asked.

  “A group of right-wing religious fanatics,” Hart explained. “I’m told there are about twenty of them, half of them carrying signs. They’re an independent group not affiliated with any of the major churches in the area.”

  Jordan didn’t need to ask what types of hate-filled slogans were on the signs. She knew the rhetoric all too well. Having been Devon’s best friend most of her life, she had been exposed to this kind of hatred and ignorance before. She had been raised as a Christian and she believed in most of the basic, old-fashioned values that had been observed by generations of her family. She also believed strongly in love, understanding, and tolerance. At the very heart of Christianity and every other great religion in the world was one core belief—God is love. God loved. People hated.

  No wonder Devon was half out of his mind. He had seen the protestors, read the signs, knew he was despised.

  “You can stay here in the car,” Rick told her. “Let me go in and get Devon.”

  “No, he won’t leave unless I go in and get him. You have no idea how fragile he is. Ever since Dan died…” She laid her hand on Rick’s arm. “The townhouse holds a great many happy memories for Devon. It’s been difficult for him to say goodbye. But he isn’t safe here and he will be at home with me in Priceville.”

  “It’s going to get ugly out there,” Hart warned her, then looked right at Rick. “It’ll take both of us to get her through.”

  Rick nodded. “Yeah.”

  Once out on the sidewalk, Rick and Jordan waited while Hart finished a brief conversation with someone, probably a member of the police force. Then Rick and Hart flanked Jordan, Rick to her left and slightly behind her and Hart to her right and one step in front of her. Their path remained clear until approximately thirty feet from the townhouse. Suddenly one of the reporters spotted Jordan and called out her name. He came running toward her, micro phone in hand and a cameraman racing along behind him.

  “Brace yourself,” Rick whispered.

  The police barricade prevented vehicles from entering or exiting the city block, but the official manpower was concentrated at the front and back of the townhouse. It would have taken a riot squad to keep the horde of reporters and protestors at bay.

  “What type of relationship did you have with your husband, Mrs. Price?” a reporter shouted. “Did you have sex with both the senator and Mr. Markham? Or did you simply watch while they had sex?”

  Jordan felt Rick’s muscles tense. “Ignore them,” she told him.

  “I can, if you can,” he replied.

  A barrage of questions followed, each one bouncing off Jordan like water off a duck’s back. She had no intention of dignifying the lurid questions with answers. Neither the heartless paparazzi nor the pit-bull legitimate reporters could harm her anymore than she’d already been harmed. Her reputation was in shreds, her personal life past and present exposed for the world to see, her children hounded, her best friend harassed unmercifully, her family hiding away at Price Manor, and her bodyguard shot.

  “Did you sleep three to a bed?” someone else called out to her.

  “Whose baby were you carrying?”

  “Are you a lesbian, Mrs. Price? Do you hate men?”

  “Just how many men have you killed?”

  “Who are the guys with you, Jordan?” Another reported yelled. “Have you moved on and formed a new threesome?”

  “You’d better watch out,” someone else hollered. “One of you could be her next victim.”

  Snide laughter clashed with the damnations chanted by the sign-carrying bigots, the resulting sound a loud echo of voices that didn’t blend.

  The ugly questions and the vicious taunts continued as Rick and Hart plowed a path through the crowd lining the sidewalk and covering the street. Jordan didn’t know if it was their formidable size, both men being tall and muscular, or the steely determination in their eyes combined with auras of sheer masculine strength that parted the reporters, hecklers and onlookers. But they all fell away, one by one, as Jordan and her protectors marched toward the front entrance of the townhouse.

  “Got your key?” Rick asked her.

  “It’s in my pocket.”

  “I want you to walk up the steps and unlock the door,” he told her. “Hart and I will guard your back and then follow you inside.”

  Hart spoke to one of the policeman at the foot of the front steps and the officer
stepped aside to allow them to pass. Jordan followed Rick’s instructions, ignoring the barrage of new questions and insults propelled at her and the rocks hitting and cracking the windows and bouncing off the brick walls. A few golf ball size stones barely missed her head. Despite her hands shaking, she managed to insert the key in the lock and open the door. Not glancing back, she entered the marble-floored foyer. Within seconds, Rick came in behind her and then Hart, who closed and locked the door.

  She didn’t wait for her companions. She hurried down the hall, calling Devon’s name. If she knew Devon, and she did, he would be waiting for her in the cozy den, a room in the center of the house with one window that opened onto the small screened back porch. There, he was more protected from the ugliness going on outside.

  Just as she reached the den, the door opened and Devon stepped out. He rushed into her open arms. She hugged him to her, rubbing his back, and whispering soothingly to him.

  “It’s all right. I’m here now.”

  “You practically risked your life coming through that pack of wild animals out there,” Devon said as he hugged her and then lifted his head from her shoulder. “How are we going to manage to get out of here?”

  “We’re going out the back and through your neighbor’s yard,” Rick said as he approached. “Hart has a distraction planned out front in approximately”—he glanced at his wristwatch—“ten minutes. We don’t have much time, so don’t bring anything with you. Whatever you want can be picked up later. Powell’s is sending a couple of agents to guard the townhouse.”

  “What if the distraction doesn’t work?” Devon asked.

  “Then we’ll face them down,” Rick said.

  “Ignore the reporters and feel sorry for those poor, misguided people who misuse the Bible to justify their hatred,” Jordan told him. “We used to stand up to people like that when we were just teenagers, remember?”

  Devon nodded. “That seems like a lifetime ago. Before I met Dan and started living a double life.”

  “You did what you did to protect Dan. No one can fault you for that.” Jordan eyed Rick, her gaze daring him to contradict her.