by Nika Rhone
“I gave Charles back his ring.”
There was a small amount of satisfaction to be had in the dumbfounded expressions on her friends’ faces. It wasn’t often that she got to surprise them, much less shock them into total silence.
It only lasted for a second, though, before Lillian leaned forward in her seat. “Okay, I must have heard that wrong. You did what, now?”
“I gave Charles back his ring.” Amelia rubbed her left hand, still not used to the emptiness there. “I talked to him this morning, and I told him I wasn’t going to marry him.”
“Oh.” Still looking stunned, Thea reached out and grasped Amelia’s hand. “Oh, Mellie. Sweetie. Are you sure? I mean, are you really sure that’s what you want?”
“Of course, she is!” Lillian all but launched herself off the chair, pulling Amelia to her feet and into a hug that nearly knocked the breath out of her. “It’s the best thing she could have possibly done! Maybe not the best timing, but…” Her burst of enthusiasm faltered. Pulling back, she gave Amelia an uneasy smile. “You are sure, right? This is what you want? Because if not, I’ll just sit down and shut my big mouth, right after I pull both my feet out.”
“It’s what I want.” Amelia looked at Thea, who still had a doubtful look on her face. “Really. It’s the best decision I’ve made in my…entire…life.” The last words were more sobbed than spoken and were followed by all the tears she’d refused to shed the night before, or even that morning, knowing if she did, if she allowed herself any measure of release, she might lose the resolve that would get her through what needed to be done.
Arms came around her from both directions. The show of unconditional love from the only two people who had ever given it made her cry even harder until she was all but being held up entirely by their embrace. They didn’t try to tell her it would be all right or try to calm her down and get her to stop crying. They just held on until she just didn’t have the strength to cry any longer.
Then she went into the bathroom and threw up.
There was a fresh cup of tea waiting for her when Amelia came back, along with a small package of crackers. It was comforting her friends knew her that well, but it was also embarrassing. Neither of them had ever cried so hard they’d vomited. Not even Thea, when she thought she’d lost Doyle to his sexpot ex-girlfriend. So what did it say about her that she did it often enough for them to find it so unremarkable?
“So?” Lillian prompted after a few silent moments of Amelia sipping lemon garnished Darjeeling and slowly chewing the crackers.
Amelia put down her cup. At least this time it didn’t rattle.
“You both must think I’m the biggest idiot walking the face of the planet.” She shushed their automatic protests. “I know you never liked Charles very much, but despite the polite distance that’s grown between us since the engagement, and the disagreements we had over the wedding plans, I truly believed I could make things work between us.” Her hands found the napkin in her lap and started pleating it as she spoke. “But then after last night…” She shook her head. “I knew it never would.”
“What happened last night?” Thea asked. “Did you talk to him about the townhouse thing?”
A bitter laugh escaped Amelia. “Oh, I went to talk to him, all right.”
“And?”
“And I found him with his pants around his knees and his…” She broke off, unable to verbalize the picture that was forever burned into her memory. If she could wash her brain out with bleach and a sharp stick, she would. “Let’s just say he was too busy polling one of his constituents to talk with me.”
“He…he…” Thea stuttered, clearly at a loss for words. Lillian, on the other hand, had no such impediment.
“That slimy bastard!” She slapped the arms of her chair with both hands. “That two-faced, lying son of a bitch!”
“Lil…” Thea tried to break in.
“How dare he do that to you! At a party being given for your wedding? A freaking week before you’re supposed to marry him?”
“Lillian…”
“He needs to be castrated! No, that’s too good for him. You need to hit him where it will really hurt. You need to find a way to make him suffer. Slap him with a lawsuit for infidelity or breach of promise or…or just being a major dickhead or something. Oh! Maybe we can get him drunk and tie him to a lamppost in front of City Hall wearing nothing but a sign that says ‘lame duck’ tied around his—”
“Lillian!”
“What?”
Thea glared at her. “Shut. Up.”
With a growl, Lillian slapped the chair’s arm again. “He needs to die.”
“I know, but this isn’t about him right now.”
Lillian swiveled in her seat and sent Amelia an apologetic look that didn’t cancel out the fury still burning in her eyes. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I got a little carried away. What can we do?”
“Nothing. Although I did kind of like the sound of that last idea you had.” Amelia surprised herself by only being half joking when she said it. She’d never thought of herself as a spiteful person before.
Then again, after what she’d seen and heard, she was entitled to enjoy just the tiniest bit of spite, wasn’t she?
“What did he say when you told him you were calling off the wedding?” Thea asked.
That memory stung almost as much as the first one. “That I was overreacting. Being childish. Unreasonable.” Realizing she was no longer pleating the napkin but strangling it, she smoothed it out on her lap and picked up her tea. “I don’t think he believed I would do it.”
“Overreacting? Childish?”
Lillian’s shrill tone meant she was about to wind up again, so Amelia was quick to say, “I didn’t tell him that I saw him last night. I only brought up him letting the townhouse go without talking to me first.” Which was only the latest in about a dozen other things he’d done without her knowledge or input, things that affected not just him, but them.
Sometimes she wondered if he remembered there was a them.
“Why the hell wouldn’t you slap him right upside the head with it?” Lillian asked.
“I wanted to hold it in reserve to use if I needed it.” Plus, she’d been a little too afraid to hear the reasoning behind his infidelity. Somehow, some way, he’d turn it around and make it her fault that he cheated.
“He had to have believed you when you gave him back the ring,” Thea said.
Amelia thought back to the exact expression on Charles’s face when she’d placed the platinum set two-carat ring on the desk blotter in front of him. Not surprise. Not concern. Not even hurt.
No. What she’d gotten when she gave him back the symbol of his supposed commitment to her, to their future life together, was impatience.
“He put it in his pocket and said he’d hold onto it until I realized how ridiculous I was being.”
“Ridi—ow!” Lillian shot Thea a nasty look and scooted her chair a few inches to the left. To Amelia she said, “I’m all-in for castrating. Just say the word.”
Amelia tried to smile, but she was too tired. Tired of the stress, the tension, the stomach-churning anxiety of the last few weeks. Tired of always being the one to bend and give and accept less than, or other than, what she wanted. Tired of being everyone’s chess piece to move around willy-nilly as they needed her.
“What about your mother?” Thea approached the subject with all the caution of someone walking up to a bomb.
Amelia’s fingers tightened on the cup. “She was on her way out to brunch at the country club when I told her. She said we’d discuss it when she got back.”
“She didn’t think you wanting to call off your wedding was important enough to cancel her brunch plans?”
“She was joining the First Lady and the governor’s wife. Trust me, nothing short of the zombie apocalypse would make her cancel those plans.” Not when she expected her pathetic, weak-willed daughter to be dutifully waiting on her return as instructed.
Not this time, Mother. Just thinking it filled her with a strange combination of giddy elation and stark terror.
“I take it you’re not planning on being there to oblige her when she gets back?” Thea asked.
“No.” She’d made her decision. There was no going back.
“So…what can we do?”
Amelia took a deep breath and ignored the slight heave in her stomach when she said, “I need a ride to the airport.”
****
“I’m sorry you had to come with me.”
It was probably the fifth, no, the sixth, time that Amelia Westlake issued the apology since they left the hotel suite, and they weren’t even over Kentucky yet. Only the pity he felt for her and her circumstances kept Daryl’s annoyance at bay.
“It’s not a big deal.” And it wasn’t. It was a job. It just wasn’t the job he’d gone to Connecticut to do. That job was still sitting in her hotel room with Lillian Beaumont, trying to figure out a way to mitigate the shit-storm that would fly once Amelia’s departure became common knowledge.
But as Doyle had pointed out, with the wedding called off, there wouldn’t be any parties for Thea to attend, or a townhouse for her to decorate, so the extra security that Daryl had come to provide was no longer needed. Which left him free to accompany the erstwhile bride back to Colorado.
At first, Thea wanted to fly back with Amelia herself. So had Lillian. If they had, though, Doyle suggested—rightly so—that it could be misinterpreted as them applying undue influence on Amelia and her decision to cancel the wedding and return home. Willfully misinterpreted, if past experience was any yardstick. The Davenports and Westlakes loved nothing so much as a scapegoat.
Thea hadn’t cared. Her friend needed her, and she wanted to be there for her, damn the consequences. As usual, Lillian stood at her side, backing up her decision, the two of them ready to take on the world for the sake of their darling Princess.
It was Amelia who told them no.
Not a word they were used to hearing from her, judging by their stunned expressions. It had been entertaining to watch Thea lose an argument to Amelia. Right up until she’d given in—with ill grace—under the single condition that Amelia not make the trip alone.
Daryl turned his head to look at his charge. She was half in profile, staring out the window, her posture so rigid and straight it had to hurt. A pinch of guilt nipped at him. His response had been a little too flippant. Just because he’d been relegated to babysitter didn’t mean he had to act like an ass.
“I don’t mind escorting you home.” That didn’t seem like enough, so he added, “I’m just sorry things turned out the way they did for you.” It was pretty inadequate as apologies went, but he couldn’t say what he was really thinking, which was more along the lines of “why did you wait so damn long?”
Amelia lifted a shoulder, acknowledging his words but not replying.
He’d tried. He should let it go, and enjoy the rest of the trip in silence, tense as it might be. But his damned conscience kept poking at him. “If my opinion matters at all, I think you’re doing the right thing.”
That earned a soft, cynical laugh. “Running away, you mean?” She continued to stare out at the passing clouds. “Doesn’t that make me a coward?”
See, this was why he should have kept his mouth shut. That was one of those woman questions that just didn’t have a right answer, like “do you think my sister’s pretty?” Even tense silence would have been a better choice. “No.”
“Liar.”
The word was so soft he almost missed it under the plane’s ambient noise. If he hadn’t been looking at her and hadn’t seen her mouth move, he would have. Anger welled at the accusation, the second one in as many days, only to ebb away when he realized that, on some level, she was right. A part of him did think she was taking the coward’s way out by jumping on a plane and running home to hide, rather than sticking around to deal with the fallout of her decision.
Then again, if she stayed, there was a better than even chance her parents would have been able to work their usual water torture technique and get her to change her mind back again despite what she truly wanted. Was it cowardice to avoid the temptation of falling back into old habits? In that light, Amelia was no more a coward than a recovering alcoholic who walked out of a party to keep from taking a drink.
“There is such a thing as a strategic retreat, you know,” Daryl said. “That doesn’t make you a coward. It makes you smart.”
There wasn’t an immediate response to that, but after a few long seconds, Amelia shifted in her seat to look at him, her posture easing just a little. “I don’t feel very smart at the moment, but…thank you.”
Daryl gave a short nod of acknowledgment before turning his attention to the screen embedded in the seatback in front of him that showed their flight’s route on a map of the country. Just over three hours left.
Fucking wonderful.
His mind jumped ahead to what he needed to do once they landed in Denver. The only luggage between them was Amelia’s small carry-on tote, so they could head straight for the car that Doyle had arranged to be waiting to pick them up. After that, it was a quick forty-five-minute drive to Boulder. Once he dropped Amelia at the Westlake estate, he’d been told to take the next few days off.
That had been Doyle’s plan. His plan was to head back to the airport and catch the next return flight to Connecticut. Because his gut was telling him there was no way the political powerhouses of Davenport and Westlake would accept the disruption of their carefully laid plans without a fight.
Chapter Four
That worry still preyed on Daryl’s mind when their car swung into the wide garden-lined cobblestone driveway of the Westlake estate over two hours later. An accident on Route 36 had slowed traffic to a near standstill, delaying them and screwing up the timetable he’d worked out in his head for catching the five o’clock flight back east. If they could offload their charge with a minimum of fuss, he jettisoned the idea of eating anything, and Sam Britten broke a few speed limits to get him back to Denver, he still might have a chance at making the last direct flight of the day, but it would be close.
Daryl was already opening the door as the car glided to a stop at the base of the ornate granite steps leading to the equally ostentatious front doors. Even as he weighed the odds on whether to chance that the accident had been cleared or to take E-470 instead, habit had him scanning his surroundings as he stepped to the rear of the Town Car, giving a nod of acknowledgment to the two men flanking the bottom of the steps.
His hand hesitated over the door handle. Thoughts of the drive to Denver were forgotten as instinct kicked in, setting off alarms. Something was off. Giving the area another sweeping look, Daryl struggled to find what was pinging on his subconscious. It didn’t make sense that there would be any kind of danger here. The estate had security coming out the wazoo. Senator Westlake employed more guards than Frank Fordham did, even if most of them were currently back in Connecticut.
Shit.
Shifting his body away from the car, Daryl looked again at the two men by the stairs. They were what was wrong. Like extras out of a Kevin Costner movie, they were doing the classic bodyguard pose, one hand grasping the opposite wrist. There was no reason for it. There was no reason for them to be there at all.
Unless there was trouble.
“Phillip. Mitch.” Daryl gave each man a slow nod. He didn’t know them well enough to read, but they were much too tense, way too on alert. He didn’t like it.
“Daryl.” It wasn’t either of the two men who spoke, but rather the older man striding down the steps toward him.
“Leon.” Daryl echoed the careful tone the Westlake security’s second-in-command had used. His hands dropped casually to his sides. Not aggressive, but ready. He just didn’t know for what.
Stopping a few paces away, Leon Banford acknowledged the stance with a brisk nod. “We expected you almost an hour ago.”
Daryl froze. “I was
n’t aware you were expecting us at all.”
“Paul contacted me from the jet with your flight info.”
A short sentence, but multiple levels of information and innuendo. Paul Kent was the head of the senator’s security, Leon’s boss. If he was onboard the senator’s private jet, that meant he was on his way back to Colorado, and since he rarely left his boss’s side, that meant the senator was on his way back as well.
“Interesting how he got that information so quickly,” Daryl said.
“Could be he made a lucky guess.”
“Or could be he used one of the senator’s contacts with Homeland.”
Leon’s wide shoulders raised in a faint shrug. “Senator Westlake knows a lot of important people.” Nothing in his expression gave anything away, but Daryl couldn’t help feel that it was some kind of a warning.
Damn, he really hated mind games. “Look, Leon…”
Before he could continue, the car’s tinted rear window slid down and Amelia looked out at Daryl, a small frown pinching her already pale face. “Is there a problem?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Daryl replied.
Amelia looked past him and smiled. “Hello, Leon. Is everything all right?”
A responding smile spread over the older man’s face, gentling features that spoke clearly of more than a few years in a boxing ring. “Miss Amelia,” he said with a respectful dip of his dark, bald head. “I’m sorry things don’t seem to have worked out the way they should have for you.”
“Thank you.” Her lips twisted into a wry smile. “So am I.”
“If you could just give us another minute, please?”
For some reason, Daryl felt a small tug of satisfaction at the fact Amelia looked to him before answering. He gave a small nod. Something was definitely going on, and he wanted to know what it was.
With a tiny huff and a roll of her eyes, the window went back up.
Daryl turned his full attention to Leon, although he was peripherally aware that Sam had stepped from the car, leaving the driver’s door open and the engine running. He wouldn’t know what was going on, but the small bit of conversation he would have just heard would be enough to let him know something was.