A Heart's End - A Billionaire Romance Novel (Romance, Billionaire Romance, Life After Love Book 6)

by Nancy Adams

  “Oh, Claire!”

  “Just hold on, Ma.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  At the Cliff Face helipad, Claire waited impatiently as Sam’s helicopter loomed into view. Beside her was Jess, who also eagerly awaited her father’s return. The moment the craft was landed, the door slid open and Sam jumped out. He first went up to Jess and hugged his daughter warmly, before turning gingerly to Claire. On her face he noted a sad expression and he immediately leaned forward, taking her in his arms in a solemn embrace, to which she burst into tears.

  When they had parted, Jess asked her father about David.

  “He’s still in Mexico, Jessy. But John will bring him back soon. I’m sure of it.”

  The little girl allowed herself a half-smile.

  “But first,” Sam went on, “I have to go with Claire to pick her mother up.”

  “I know, Claire told me.”

  “Not everything, I hope,” Sam said worriedly turning to Claire as he did.

  “No, not all of it,” Claire said shaking her head. “I just told her that my mom had fallen out with my father and we needed to get her away from him.”

  “Okay,” Sam let out with an element of relief.

  Sam then hugged his daughter again and sent her into the house, while he and Claire made their way to the garage, where two of Sam’s security men were waiting outside a black Mercedes saloon.

  “Have you got people surveying both the house with June Prior and the movements of Joe Prior?” Sam asked them as they got into the car.

  “We have, sir,” one of them answered. “We have eyes on both the house of the friend and on Prior himself.”

  “Where is Prior?” Claire asked.

  “He’s giving a speech at a high school in Colorado Springs. The Sheriff’s department are due to arrest him there any minute now.”

  A glimmer of malice flittered through Claire at the thought of her father being arrested in front of so many people, the beginnings of his public shaming. But she checked herself, and felt somehow wrong for having felt it.

  They were soon streaming out of the gate of the reserve and meeting the freeway, about three-and-a-half hours from June. As they drove, Sam held his arm around Claire and she sank into his shoulder.

  “Would you like to see a photograph of our son?” he asked her out of the blue, wanting to raise her mood a little.

  “You have one?”

  “Yes. I had someone hack into the Lees’ e-mail account and they found a photograph of him there.”

  “Can I see?” she let out, removing herself from his side and sitting up attentively.

  Sam brought his phone out of his pocket and went through the photos. Eventually, he came to one of David and showed it to Claire. She took the phone off of him and gazed at the screen with a dreamy expression, her shimmering eyes glaring at it, studying every detail of the boy’s face, every contour and line of the happy face that gazed joyfully back from the picture, her mother’s eyes soaking it all up: smiling face, crystal blue eyes similar to Sam’s, freckles across his nose similar to Claire’s, a head of brown hair the same chestnut shade of Claire’s.

  It was just like Sam had said over the phone to her the other day—he was the living embodiment of their love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Joe Prior was at Barclay High School in Colorado Springs giving a speech about his support for the school sports programs, and that as mayor he would continue to support the proud tradition of American sports that the city represented. It was as he was talking, a proud charisma to his voice, that the doors of the school gymnasium burst open and a small commotion broke out. He paused his speech and glanced over at one of his security men, who merely shrugged and walked off in the commotion’s direction. Then, looking back at the recently opened doors, Joe saw that it was the police that were forcing their way into the room, showing their badges and remonstrating with the security.

  “I’m sorry, folks,” Joe said casually to the audience, who were now more concerned with the ruckus to the side of them than the mayoral candidate standing in front, “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but we should have it under control pretty soon.”

  At that moment, Sheriff Daniels broke through Joe’s security and made his way to the front. He stopped right beneath the podium that Joe was standing behind, looked Joe right in the eyes—a man that he’d regularly gone fishing with for the last twenty years—and announced, “Joe Prior I am arresting you under…”

  Joe heard no more. Everything went fuzzy, like a bomb had gone off in his face. He was dazed, and continued to look around him as his rights were read out. When a deputy came onto the stage and around the back of him, Joe submitted to it all completely as the cuffs were placed on his wrists, flashbulbs going off in his face as he was ushered through the audience and out of the gymnasium, his whole world appearing to crumble around him.

  Later on, when he attempted to remember those moments, Joe found that it had all gone off as though in a dream, and that large parts of it were completely missing to him. For instance, he recalled nothing of the car ride to the police station, or being booked in at the front desk. It must have happened like that, that was the procedure, and he must have been complicit. But as to the memory of it, he knew nothing.

  Once Sheriff Daniels got him into the interrogation room, Joe merely sat there and burst into tears, blubbing like a child, so much so that Daniels almost felt sorry for him. Well, almost, anyway. After the images he’d seen earlier that day, all concern for Joe Prior had faded in Sheriff Daniels’s mind. Like June, he felt that he had always known nothing real of the proud owner of a chain of hardware stores and the future mayor of Colorado Springs.

  Joe asked for his lawyer and the man was sent for, arriving not ten minutes after he’d been contacted. When he entered the room, Joe looked up at the man, Robert Peterson, his lawyer for fifteen years, and burst straight back into tears at the sight of another old friend, placing his head back down into his palms. Robert, a rather rotund individual with jowls hanging from his face and a bald head, asked Daniels about the charges and, as he was told, his face kept going paler and paler. From time to time, as the evidence was given to him, Robert would glance down at Joe as the latter cried into his hands. Like Daniels, he too had known Joe as a friend for a long time, and everything that he was now being told, as well as Joe’s obvious guilty look, was shredding so much that he thought he knew about the guy.

  “I’d like some time in private with my client before we proceed,” Robert said to the sheriff.

  “Take as long as you need,” Daniels replied as he left the room.

  When the door closed, Joe jumped slightly. Peterson sat down opposite his client and looked at him while he cried pitifully.

  “Joe,” Peterson said, “what the fuck is all of this? Please, tell me this is all a bunch of bull. They’re saying that they have your prints on the USB and the laptop, as well as evidence that it is indeed your laptop and that your bank details have been found on several transactions pertaining to…Well, to this shit. Is this all true or is it something else? You haven’t been, you know, looking at this shit have you?”

  “I got a sickness, Robbie,” Joe mumbled from out of his hands.

  “Oh, dear God,” Peterson said, wiping the frosty sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “Is there more?” he went on. “Tony says that they’re gonna search your home, your holiday cottage and your businesses. They say that they suspect there’s more there. They think you may have done other things; not just watched. Is that true?”

  “I don't know,” was all Joe could say, his face still planted in his hands.

  “What the fuck does that mean!? You don’t know!? I need some hard answers, Joe. You’re already in up to your balls; we need to buy time to get rid of anything else you may have.”

  Joe looked up slowly from his hands and at his lawyer.

  “You really wanna help me on this?” he asked.

  “I’m your lawyer.
It’s my professional duty to help my client. Don’t get me wrong; you’re a son-of-a-bitch! And that’s my God’s-honest testimony on it. But we might be able to get you a lighter jail sentence if we can restrict it to what it is at the moment: just looking. So you tell me straight”—and here Peterson looked Joe right in the eyes—“have you got anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Joe answered weakly. “I got a fake account through the company that I use for…I use it for…getting girls.”

  “Holy shit, Joe!” the lawyer exclaimed with exasperation, once more wiping his glistening, pink forehead. “What the fuck have you been doing?”

  “I order them online. Young girls. All underage. I joined a club. I pay through this company account, it’s all fraudulent.”

  “I’m afraid fraud’s the least of your worries. You’re facing child abuse, Joe. Where do these girls come from?”

  “I don’t know,” he said shaking his head. “They bring them with a bodyguard who waits outside the hotel room. I get the night with her and…”

  “I don’t wanna—and I don’t need to—know that. All I need to know is can you get rid of this evidence linking you with this fake account?”

  “Yeah, but only if I get to a computer. But maybe you could do it?”

  “No, fucking way,” Peterson let out, raising his hands up. “That would constitute tampering with evidence, concealing a crime, involvement with child abuse. No, my friend, I will not risk everything for that. My professional integrity doesn’t reach that far.”

  “Then what can I do?”

  The lawyer got up for a moment and began pacing the room, rubbing his sweaty brow all the time, as though that would somehow alleviate the sudden horrifying situation that had entrusted itself to him.

  “Okay, here’s what,” Peterson said after he’d made several passes of the room, sitting down once again, “you’re gonna deny everything. No comment the shit out of it. They’ve already charged you, but at least by petitioning for not guilty, we’ll be able to get you out on bail. I’ll bail you at my house; where better to be than with your lawyer, right? Then tonight you’re gonna go up to bed and lie down. When you hear that no one is around, you’re gonna sneak into my study and use the computer in there while I sit in the kitchen with my wife. You’re gonna get rid of everything you can from your files. Can you reach them from my computer?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then you erase it. If they find out, Dolores will say that I was with her the whole time and that we thought you were in bed and had no idea what you were doing. Okay?”

  “But Robbie—”

  “But Robbie shit! Do you know what they do to people like you in prison? If you want to get out of this with a maximum of just four years, you could be out on parole within two. However, if they find the rest, you could be in for life. So, as your lawyer and your only friend at this point, I’m advising you to plead not guilty for the time being. Once the evidence is wiped, I’ll drive you back to the station myself and change your plea to one of guilty for the images and the transfers. You’ll be labeled a sex offender for the rest of your life and you’ll get a couple of years, but at least you won’t die in prison.”

  “Okay,” Joe let out in a despondent tone.

  “Then I’ll call Tony back in and you just follow my lead.”

  “Wait,” Joe said, “how did they get all of this?”

  “I don’t know. But apparently it came from your house.”

  In that instant Joe knew that it was his wife who had betrayed him. Only she could have found something in the house, because only she was there at the moment. Plus the last couple of days since Claire had visited her, she’d been acting strangely around him. BITCH! he screamed out in his head. A rage erupted inside of him and he very nearly brought his fist down onto the table, but controlled himself.

  “Have you got ahold of June yet?” he inquired with an air of nonchalance. “Is she at the house?”

  “I got ahold of her, but she’s not at the house. I tried calling her there while I was on my way here. I wanted to inform her that you'd been arrested. I got no answer, so I tried her mobile. She answered that and said she was at a friend’s, and after that, she put the phone down. No more.”

  Joe knew for sure then that his wife was at Agnes’s, and he suddenly became more willing to go along with his lawyer’s plan. Not about erasing the data; Joe didn’t care about evading what was due to him anymore. No, Joe wanted out of a cell for the meantime so that he could take care of something else entirely.

  “You go tell them I’m ready,” Joe said firmly, “and I’ll go along with whatever you want.”

  After that, Peterson did what he said he would and invited the sheriff back into the room. The tape recorder was turned on and Joe made a no comment to everything. Once that was done, he was escorted with Peterson to the local courthouse where he pleaded not guilty and bail was set for five hundred thousand dollars, much to the Sheriff’s department’s chagrin, as they’d requested that no bail be set.

  Joe was then taken back to Peterson’s house and fitted by the court with an electronic tag. Unbeknown to them, though, a car had discreetly followed them all the way from the station to Peterson’s house, making sure to park far enough up the road to see the goings on at the house, but not be noticed in any specific way. The car, of course, belonged to one of Sam’s security team, Jeff Sanders.

  There, he sat and watched the house with particular attention, seeing what would happen next, and phoned up Sam to inform him of the development.

  “My source in the station,” Sanders said to Sam, who was still at least half an hour away from reaching June, “said that he’d denied the charges and that he’d been given bail. He’s now at his lawyers house.”

  “Is it far from June Prior’s position?” Sam asked.

  “Not far at all. About a five- to ten-minute drive. I’ll keep—”

  But in that moment something stopped Jeff in the midst of his speech. In front of him, he saw Joe Prior arguing with the lawyer on the front lawn of the house. Joe was marching toward a car on the drive and Peterson was obviously trying to get him back inside the house. Then, Joe Prior turned and pointed a pistol at the lawyer and the latter threw his hands up, backing off.

  “Oh, shit!” the security man let out.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Prior’s just left the house with a pistol. He’s now getting into a car.”

  At that moment, Joe roared up the engine of Peterson’s car, before reversing it out onto the road, putting the car into forward gear and sprinting out of there. Jeff Sanders instantly started his engine, placed his own car in gear and rushed after him.

  “I’m in pursuit of him. I’ll warn Jordon at the other house. I think Prior’s going after his wife.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The member of Sam’s team that had been sent to guard June at Agnes’s house was Jordon Sale. When he got the call from his colleague Jeff that Prior was on the move and heading in his direction, he instantly went into action mode, getting out of his car and approaching the house at a brisk pace. His colleague had recently lost Joe Prior in heavy traffic as the latter had torn through the streets on his way to Jordon’s position. Prior was armed and to be considered extremely dangerous. The Sheriff’s department had already been alerted by both Joe’s ankle bracelet tripping their system and a call from Peterson claiming that his client had gone AWOL. However, they were at least ten minutes from the scene.

  Jordon made it quickly to Agnes’s front door and knocked loudly. When Agnes answered, she gave him a confused face as he barged into the premises and closed the door behind himself.

  “How many of you are in the house?” he asked her.

  “Wait a minute, who are you?”

  “I’m a member of Sam Burgess’s security team and I’ve been sent to protect you both.”

  “Protect us from what?”

  “How many in the house?” Jordon asked with cutting firmness.
/>
  “Just me and June.”

  At that moment, June entered the hallway from the kitchen, her face still wet with tears and looked upon the scene with the same level of confusion as her friend.

  “I need you both to come with me,” Jordon said to her. “We have reason to believe that Joe Prior is armed and on his way to this—”

  But in that second, they all heard the sound of a car screeching down the street toward them. It’s too late, Jordon thought. I’ll have to protect them here.

  “Okay, ladies,” he said firmly, “I need you both to go upstairs. Do you have a bathroom with a locked door?”

  “Yes,” Agnes replied, aghast at this latest development.

  “Then go up there and lock yourselves in. I’ll stand guard and stop him from coming up.”

  Agnes took hold of June and ushered her up the stairs.

  “But he’s my husband,” June muttered as Agnes guided her, “perhaps I can talk to him.”

  “I don’t think you can, ma’am,” Jordon informed her. “Now, please, go with your friend.”

  The two women fled upstairs and locked themselves in the main bathroom, huddling for some reason in the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled across. Meanwhile, at the foot of the stairs, Jordon stood with his gun out, aimed at the door. The car came to a stop right outside in the driveway and Jordon heard the door slam. He waited with anticipation for the front door of the house to be kicked down. But after almost a minute he realized that this wasn’t going to happen and he began to surmise that Joe had found some other way into the house.

  With cautious steps, Jordon made his way gingerly across the hallway to the kitchen. As he did, he suddenly spotted Joe walking toward him with his gun out, having gotten in through the backdoor that he knew was always unlocked.

  “PUT THE WEAPON DOWN!” Jordon screamed at Joe, his gun pointed on the armed man.