by Lisa Childs
“You know, Miss Drake, because he told you,” he said, his voice sharp with impatience. “Tobias told you everything about me.”
“He doesn’t know much,” she reminded him. “He didn’t even know you existed.”
“He’s lying,” Edward insisted.
She shook her head. “You know he had no idea, that he was shocked…”
He chuckled. “Shocked that someone outsmarted and outmaneuvered him.”
She shivered, more at the evilness in the man’s face than his words. How could he look so much like Tobias, share the same handsome features, his strong jaw and arresting blue eyes, but be so ugly inside?
“He had to have known about me,” Edward insisted. “Because she kept him. She raised him.”
“She never told him the truth. I don’t think he had it easy, staying with her. You might have been luckier that she gave you up.”
“She sold me,” Edward bitterly corrected her, “exchanging me for drug money. Then I was sold again—to a woman who was too old to have a baby of her own and too screwed up to adopt. Then when she got desperate for drugs, she sold me, too. I was passed around because no one wanted to keep me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it doesn’t excuse what you’ve done. None of this is Tobias’s fault. And it’s certainly not Tabitha’s. She’s just a child.”
“Was,” he said with that evil smirk. “She couldn’t have survived the blast.”
Just how secure had Tobias made that panic room? She hoped safe enough to protect his daughter. “She’s your niece. Doesn’t that matter to you? Don’t you care?”
He shook his head. “I learned young that everyone’s expendable. That’s something my brother and I have in common. I warned you, Miss Drake, that he was just using you. You should have listened to me.”
She lifted her chin, refusing to let him get to her. After three years of studying him, after making love with him, she knew Tobias better than this man did. “I talked him into letting me help. I had to convince him.”
“He’s good,” Edward said with some respect. “He’s quite the manipulator.”
“He didn’t manipulate me,” Jillian insisted. She’d been manipulated before—into believing things were her fault that weren’t, into thinking she deserved things that she hadn’t. “I wanted to help.”
But had she helped? Or were both Tobias and his daughter dead? Would she have been smarter to have gone right to the police instead of the estate? But she couldn’t have trusted them.
Emotion choked her, but she fought back the tears. She couldn’t give in to them now, not when her own life was in danger. She peered through the windows as the limo pulled into the empty lot of a dark warehouse.
“This better not be a trick,” Edward warned her. He reached beneath his dark suit jacket and pulled a gun from the waistband of his pants.
He could have used it earlier, could have shot both her and Tabitha. Maybe, despite his claims to not care, he hadn’t quite been able to harm the child himself. Instead, he’d ordered the nanny to do his dirty work.
“You don’t need the gun,” she assured him, hoping he’d leave it in the car. “You saw him…back at the estate. He’s not here.”
The driver opened the back door for them, his eyes widening with fear as he spotted the weapon. Unlike some of the guards, he obviously wasn’t a mercenary.
“You know he wasn’t working alone these past couple of weeks,” Edward reminded her. “He couldn’t have managed all that destruction by himself. Someone even died helping him. That should have been another warning for you to stay away from him.”
“I was after a story,” she defended herself.
“Too bad you won’t live to report it,” Edward said as he grabbed her hair and dragged her out of the car with him.
“Help me,” she implored the driver. But the man turned his back to her and slid through the open driver’s door. “He’s not Tobias St. John. He’s an imposter.”
Edward slapped her, knocking her to the pavement. Asphalt bit into her palms as she caught herself. Then his hand was in her hair again, jerking her to her feet.
Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them back, ignoring the pain. Tobias hadn’t confided his entire plan to her, but he wouldn’t have agreed to meet this madman alone. Would he have? Shouldn’t there be someone inside the warehouse, as Edward feared? Someone willing to help her since the driver was not?
Edward shoved her forward, toward the open door of the warehouse. Then he stopped and listened before pushing her across the threshold first.
“Hello?” she called out, making sure that because of the complete darkness, no one would mistake her for Edward.
She should have gotten more of Tobias’s plan out of him. But he hadn’t trusted her, even after she’d offered to help. Was his brother right? Had he only been using her?
“Is anyone here?” she asked, her voice cracking with despair.
Edward’s hand clenched in her hair, but he said nothing, just jerked her forward.
Jillian stumbled into a crate, and pain radiated up her leg. “You should have brought a flashlight,” she murmured, “instead of a gun.”
“What is all this?” he asked in a raspy whisper eerily reminiscent of Tobias’s voice.
“It’s the ransom,” she said, running her hands over the top of the crate nearest her. Something dropped from the corner, metal clanging against cement. A crowbar?
She reached inside the crate and pulled out a handful of jewelry. The stones glinted in the light of the limo’s headlamps shining through the open door. “Tobias isn’t like you,” she said. “He keeps his word.”
Edward pulled his hand from her hair and reached for the jewelry. Purposely, she missed his palm and dropped the necklaces onto the ground.
“Sorry…” As she crouched to pick up the jewelry, her foot bumped against the crowbar. She reached behind her, grabbed it up and swung it widely, knocking it against his face and shoulder.
Curses echoed off the metal walls of the old warehouse. “You bitch!”
Her heart pounding hard against her ribs, she darted out of his reach to the other side of the crate. A shot rang out, splintering wood and glancing off metal. She ran through the maze of crates, wooden barrels and pallets that had been piled high in the warehouse. Knocking against the obstacles in the dark, she telegraphed her every move to the man who chased after her.
“I’m going to find you,” he shouted, heedless now of anyone overhearing him. “Then I’m going to kill you.”
She shuddered with fear, knowing that he could carry out his threat. In some ways he was like his brother—true to his word and single-minded.
“I’ll find you!” Edward promised her. He kicked aside barrels. Wood splintered as he threw plywood and pallets.
Crouched behind a row of crates, Jillian held her breath. She had to hide, even though her legs ached to run. So she shrank lower, so close to the ground that the cold cement chilled her skin to the bone.
Something crackled, then buzzed, and the fluorescent bulbs beamed on overhead, bathing the entire warehouse in bright light.
He laughed. “It’s no use hiding from me now.”
She trembled with fear. He was right. She needed to run, or stand and fight. Her grip tightened on the crowbar. The light could help her, too. This time when she hit him, she’d hit him hard enough…
But before she could rise from her crouch, a shadow fell across her. Edward reached down, grabbed her hair and dragged her to her feet. Then he pressed the cold barrel of his gun against her temple. “Drop that damn crowbar or I’ll blow your brains out right here.”
She dropped her weapon, which clanged against the cement floor. It was too late for her to fight now. One twitch of his finger against that trigger, and she was dead. Like Tobias and Tabitha?
“What are you going to do?” she asked him. If he intended to hurt her, she might rather that he just shot her now.
“I’m going to get the driver—we’ll load
the limo with this stuff,” he said. “I just can’t figure out whether I should kill you before or after….”
“Hear that?” she asked, catching the sound of a motor as the limo pulled out of the lot. “He left you here.”
“No!” he shouted, making her flinch in pain as he dragged her closer to the open door. “He wouldn’t dare.
He wouldn’t defy me.”
The taillights disappeared as the car turned onto an other street. “He’s gone.”
“Damn it…” he murmured, loosening his grip on her enough that she pulled away.
Jillian barely restrained the urge to laugh at his frustration, but she couldn’t resist pointing out, “Now that everyone knows you’re not Tobias, you’ve lost your power. Hell, it was never really yours, anyway. It was his.”
Edward lifted the gun, pointing the barrel between her eyes. “I still have power over you. Your life is liter ally in my hands.”
AND BECAUSE OF THAT, because Edward held a gun to the head of the woman Tobias loved, his brother still had power over him. He cursed himself now for not carrying the gun Morris had brought him two weeks ago when he’d first returned to River City.
“Just shoot him…”
“I can’t get close enough,” he’d explained. But the truth was he hadn’t wanted to kill; he’d done enough of that in the Special Forces. He hadn’t wanted anyone to die.
Until now.
“Then let me kill him,” Morris had offered.
“No, it’s too risky. You kill him, and those mercenaries he hired will kill you.” Tobias hadn’t wanted to lose his longtime friend or Tabitha’s protector. But in the end, it hadn’t been Morris who had protected his daughter.
Jillian had.
He wanted to protect her now. Despite the bright lights overhead, he managed to keep to the shadows where he’d spent the past two weeks. He slunk around the crates, circling behind them.
“You can try to talk me into sparing your life,” Edward suggested, his deep voice full of innuendo. “Even now, you’re a beautiful woman…”
Tobias had known other beautiful women—his mother, his ex—who would have accepted such an offer, who would have done anything to get what they wanted. His ex had gotten pregnant to trap him into marriage. She’d threatened to terminate the pregnancy if he hadn’t given her what she’d wanted. She hadn’t wanted him or his daughter. Like Edward, she’d only wanted money.
Instead of accepting his offer, Jillian spat in Edward’s face. With her spittle dripping from his chin, the man lifted the gun again.
His heart pounding, Tobias hurled the cover of a crate, knocking Edward to the ground. The gun dropped from his grasp and skittered across the floor, metal scraping against cement. Jillian stumbled back; then she gazed up at him, her green eyes wide with shock.
“I thought you were dead,” Edward said with a groan as he rolled over and eased up onto his knees.
“You thought wrong,” Tobias corrected him, “about everything.”
Edward shook his head. “Oh, I don’t think so. You wouldn’t be here if your little girl needed you.”
“She doesn’t need me.”
Jillian gasped. “Oh, no. She’s not…”
“She’s fine,” Tobias assured her. “She told me to save Jilly.”
Tears glistened in those green eyes…for just a moment before she blinked them back.
“You should have stayed with your daughter,” Edward advised him as he lurched to his feet. “Because you’re not leaving here alive.” He reached for Jillian, catching her hair in his hand. “And neither is she.”
Tobias vaulted over the crate so that he finally stood face-to-face with the man who’d stolen his life. “You’re going to let her go.”
Edward laughed. “Don’t you get it yet? What else do I have to take away from you for you to understand that you have no power over me?”
Not Jillian. But if he said that, his brother was certain to kill her—right in front of Tobias’s eyes.
“Look around you,” he urged the madman. “This is all that’s left of what I had. And I’m giving it to you. All you have to do is take it and leave. There’s a truck in the back. We’ll get it loaded for you. And I’ll make sure no one stops you. You can drive far away from River City.”
“I’ll take the stuff,” Edward agreed. “But I’m taking her, too.” He jerked Jillian by her thick red hair, and the tears glistening in her eyes spilled onto her face. But she didn’t cry out.
“You’re going to let Jillian go,” Tobias repeated calmly. “Because this…war of ours…doesn’t concern her. This is about you and me.”
“There is no you and me.” His twin snorted with derision. “There hasn’t been since the womb.”
“I didn’t know about you,” Tobias insisted. “She never told me.”
“She forgot all about me?”
“Hell, most of the time she forgot about me,” Tobias said. “She was so strung out. So messed up…”
“Then why did she pick you to keep and me to sell?” Edward asked, his deep voice full of torment.
Tobias shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t care about either of us.”
“But if she’d kept me, I would have your life now. All of this would have been mine.”
“No,” Jillian answered for him. “You would have had to work for it. You would have had to have brains and ambition—not just greed.”
Edward jerked her hair so hard that her neck cracked. A little harder and it could break. Tobias didn’t think, he just reacted, slamming his fist into a face so similar to his own.
“You son of a bitch!” Edward cursed as blood spurted from his nose. But he released her. Jillian fell to her knees, barely crawling out of the way before Edward lunged at Tobias.
His fist connected with Tobias’s jaw, knocking him back. But Edward didn’t fight fair; he kicked and bit. And as they fell to the ground, he wrapped his hands around Tobias’s throat, squeezing off his air.
Tobias pounded his fists into the other man’s ribs and back, but Edward’s grip didn’t ease. His face—that damned identical face—swam before Tobias’s blurring vision as he fought…to hang on to consciousness.
He couldn’t pass out. He had to fight, had to protect Jillian. Or Edward would kill her, too.
THE TWO MEN—so identical in appearance—grappled, knocking aside barrels and wooden crates and pallets as they rolled around the cement floor of the crowded warehouse. Fists flew and the men grunted as their blows connected.
Jillian crawled forward, feeling across the cement for the crowbar or the gun—anything she could use as a weapon. She had to find something to help Tobias. The fluorescent lights glinted off metal, partially hidden beneath the corner of a crate. She eased her fingers between the pallet and the wooden box, clawing at the weapon until it slid from its hiding place.
Her breath caught as she stared down at the gun. Could she…use it? She knew how. Ironically her father had been the one to teach her to shoot. He’d been too arrogant to consider that he might have been the one she’d want to shoot.
But he had locked up his guns. She’d used them only on the firing range. She could shoot—at targets. But could she point the barrel at a human?
Grunts echoed off the metal walls and ceiling of the warehouse. She heard a groan, and a gasp for breath, as she turned back to the men. She wasn’t the only one who’d changed clothes before leaving the underground tunnels. So that he could get past security at his own estate, Tobias had dressed in a dark suit identical to the one they’d seen Edward wearing on the security footage. The black silk shirt lay open at the collar. Both men were disheveled, from rolling around on the cement, and bruised from the fists they threw at each other. Blood trickled from the nose of one of them and the lip of the other. Their dark hair, the same blue-black shade, hung nearly to their broad shoulders.
Their hands, so big and strong, wrapped tightly around each other’s throat, squeezing the life from each other. One of those
men was Tobias. What if he was the one who gave up first, who died at the hands of his twin?
She had to do something, had to help him. Her hands trembled on the gun, though. What if she shot the wrong man? She would be killing her lover and Tabitha’s father….
A rough chuckle, punctuated with grunts and pants, echoed in the warehouse. “Look, she can’t tell us apart….”
Jillian took aim and pulled the trigger.
Chapter Fifteen
“Oh, my God…” Jillian murmured, her eyes wide with horror as she stared at the man lying on the ground. Blood oozed from his chest and pooled on the cement floor. “Oh, my…”
Tobias gently eased the gun from her shaking hands. Then he pulled her into his arms and clutched her close to his madly pounding heart. “Are you all right? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she assured him, but she trembled as she clung to him. “Is he…is he dead?”
A groan from his twin answered her. Edward clutched his hand against the right side of his chest; the bullet had missed his heart, but might have struck a lung.
“Not yet,” Tobias said. Sirens, in the distance, grew louder as emergency vehicles finally approached. To make certain he’d have backup, Tobias had called them from his cell before entering the warehouse. With help coming, Edward would probably be okay. Tobias breathed a slight sigh of relief, for Jillian only. He didn’t want her to have to live with killing a man; it wasn’t something a person ever really got over. Unless that person was like his twin, more animal than human. “How did you know which one of us…?”
Her fingers, shaking still, slid over his naked face. “He couldn’t resist taunting you, gloating….”
No, he couldn’t—because Edward hated him that much. Tobias had pissed off people over the years—during his stint in the service and in business—but he’d never had someone despise him just for being born.
“The minute he did that,” she continued, “I knew which one of you he was….”
“It was stupid of him to give himself away like that,” Tobias murmured with a glance at his bleeding twin. But then Edward was so arrogant he was ignorant; he probably hadn’t believed she’d actually shoot.