In This Together

by Kara Lennox

  The space was filled with memories of his time with Elena, too. The room seemed melancholy without her vibrant presence. He went still.

  Damn, he had feelings for the woman. Real feelings, not just a passing physical attraction. She was such an incredible force of nature, like no woman he’d ever known. Even Judith, whom he once considered the love of his life, paled by comparison.

  After all these years, to want someone so totally unattainable seemed really unfair.

  Then again, when had life been fair?

  The work he was doing was messy and noisy, but he kept at it, because as long as he was focused on it, he couldn’t think about his mistakes or what was missing from his life. He didn’t take a break until it was time for lunch. He’d make a run for tacos or pizza—that would keep the crews happy.

  As he headed out of the bedroom, he checked his phone. He skidded to a stop—he’d missed a call from Elena. How in the hell? Must have been the noise. At least now he had her number. He started to call her back, but Leo, the stonemason, called to him.

  “Hey, boss? Someone here to see you.”

  Now what? “It’s not a cop, is it?” He wasn’t dumb enough to believe he was totally out of the woods as far as the kidnapping went. If Daniel Logan could figure out how to make charges stick without Elena’s help, he’d do it.

  “Not unless they’re making cops really different these days,” Leo said with a lascivious grin.

  Travis made his way toward the front door. She was standing uncertainly in the entryway. “Elena?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TRAVIS HELD THE DOOR OPEN for her, but she hesitated. “I tried calling, but you didn’t answer.”

  “How did you know...” He didn’t say it out loud, but surely she knew what he was thinking. How did she know where he would be? And how did she know how to find this house? She’d been locked in the back of his truck coming and going.

  His puzzlement must have shown on his face. “When I called Daniel from here, he tracked down the signal. A team came here looking for me, but we’d already left. I just asked Celeste for the address.”

  That explained the front door. At least they’d patched it. That was nice.

  “How resourceful of you. Come in. Sorry I didn’t hear my phone ring. It’s kind of loud in here. But you didn’t have to come all the way over.”

  “Truthfully, I needed to get out of the house. My mother is hovering and asking too many questions about why I’m not at work.”

  Travis resisted doing the same. She already knew his thoughts on the matter of her job. No sense belaboring the point.

  “I have some news. Mitch Delacroix from Project Justice got all the information you could possibly need to prove who was selling what.”

  “Seriously? You’re working with Project Justice?” Oh, wouldn’t Daniel love that? Elena using his foundation for Travis’s personal business?

  “Not exactly. I asked Mitch for help but only during his time off. Turns out he had today off. He found the items you told me about. All of them. On eBay. All listed by the same seller. This person made no attempt to hide his identity. John Stover.”

  “That’s him! That’s the foster father’s name!”

  She handed him a folder. “I’ve got all the documentation here. If you take this to the social worker, she can present it to the judge at the adoption hearing.”

  “Elena, I don’t know how to thank you.” For the first time in forever, he felt something close to hopeful. He might actually be able to do it—to stop those awful people from taking MacKenzie away forever.

  She smiled so sweetly that his heart almost stopped. “I was happy to do it. That gives you a little breathing room. Now I can help you with the Project Justice application.”

  “Um, don’t you think that’s a moot point now? Any application I fill out will go directly into the circular file. Not only did I kidnap the founder’s assistant, I upset the applecart so thoroughly that she can’t come back to work.”

  “It’s worth trying. And stop trying to take the blame for this problem between Daniel and me.”

  He would drop it for now. “Elena, I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful, because I’m not. I’m just puzzled. Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me? I’m sure there are lots of more deserving people for you to help—people who haven’t—” he lowered his voice to a whisper “—people who haven’t kidnapped you.”

  Leo and his helper chose that moment to stride through the foyer and out the front door. “Lunch,” Leo announced. “Back in a few.”

  Travis realized the sander, which had been grinding away upstairs all morning, had also gone silent. The truck belonging to the floor crew was gone, too. He’d waited too long to make a pizza run.

  He and Elena were alone in the house.

  “I’m helping you because you got to me, okay? And because I need to keep busy or Mama will enslave me in the kitchen, making pastelitos for Thanksgiving.”

  Travis knew pastelitos—little puff pastries filled with meat. “For Thanksgiving?” That struck him as funny—such a Cuban dish for the quintessential American holiday.

  Elena shrugged. “It’s what we do.”

  “Every family has its traditions, I guess. We used to eat Jell-O on Thanksgiving, so I have no room to criticize. Listen, I need to take these papers to the social worker. Soon as my crews get back from lunch. I can’t leave the house open, and I can’t lock them out.”

  She looked at her watch. “When will they be back?”

  “An hour or so. But maybe when I’m done with that...we could work on the application. The library’s open late tonight.”

  “No need for that. I’ve got my computer in the car. We can do it now. And...maybe some of that lasagna’s still in the fridge?”

  He’d forgotten about the lasagna. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Be right back.”

  She ran to her car—she was driving her father’s SUV—and fetched her computer.

  What was going on here? He felt as if he’d fallen into some alternate reality, one in which he and Elena had met some other way, that he’d never snatched her off the street and stuffed her into his truck.

  While he put the lasagna in the microwave to heat, Elena settled onto the carpet in the living room and turned on her laptop.

  “Want me to bring in a chair?”

  “That’s okay. I don’t mind sitting on the floor.” She patted the space next to her. “Ready when you are.”

  He lowered himself to the floor next to her, careful not to touch her. “How does this work?”

  “I’ll ask you the questions, you’ll answer them and I’ll type them into the form.” She had a cell phone gadget on her laptop that allowed her to go online. In moments, she’d pulled up the hated form. “Full name?”

  “Travis Brandon Riggs.”

  “Date of birth?”

  They went through a long list of identifiers—social security number, current address and previous addresses, his relationship with the incarcerated individual, his personal reasons for wanting this person to be free.

  That question stopped him. “I want him to be free because he’s innocent,” Travis said. “Do I need another reason?”

  “Absolutely not. In fact, that’s the reason Daniel looks for.”

  “What other answer could there be?”

  “Oh, a lot of people want Project Justice to help because they love someone, because they miss them, because their children miss them. But the only reason that really matters is that they’re innocent.”

  Travis nodded.

  The questions got harder after that. He had to come up with the chronology of events leading up to Eric’s arrest, the main evidence against him, the verdict on all counts named in the indictment, the sentence, where he was
incarcerated, his prisoner number.

  Travis was able to provide it all. At one point, Elena looked at him, frowning. “You have your brother’s inmate number memorized?”

  “Yeah. I told you I have a good memory.”

  “That’s not just a good memory. That’s freakish.”

  He shrugged. “I’m lucky that way, I guess. But I’d trade the memory in a second if I could get a better handle on reading and writing.”

  “I know this is nosy of me, but did you get special education in school? I mean, clearly you have some kind of learning disability.”

  “Oh, yeah, that was a treat, getting stuck in special ed.” He got mad all over again just thinking about the way he was teased, the cruelty some kids could stoop to and the fact that nobody stopped them. Eric tried to stick up for him once. Big mistake. He still had a slight bump in his nose, the only flaw in his otherwise perfect face. “In all fairness, even if any of those teachers could have helped me, I wasn’t willing to let them. I just wanted to get to age sixteen so I could drop out. As you probably know, I don’t always make the most reasoned decisions.”

  “Well, no, you don’t.” Thankfully she dropped the subject of his learning problems.

  They took a break when the lasagna was ready. The floor guys returned while Travis and Elena were in the middle of lunch. Leo gave Travis a curious look but said nothing, just headed upstairs with his helper. He supposed it was a little odd for them to see the boss man sitting on the floor having lunch with a beautiful woman.

  “You’ve got to give me this recipe.”

  “Are you allowed to cook Italian? Being Cuban and all?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Well, not me. But I would give the recipe to Mama. She likes to branch out sometimes. She can make a mean stir-fry. And you should taste her baba ghanoush.”

  That was never going to happen, because despite what this looked and felt like, he and Elena would never really be friends. For whatever reason, he had become her project, her charity case.

  Just like he’d been for Judith.

  Judith had been drawn to him for all the wrong reasons. Yes, they’d had a strong mutual attraction. She was wealthy, educated, refined—everything he wasn’t—which made her seem exotic in his eyes. She’d found his work-roughened hands and his sheer physicality a welcome change from the soft, rich boys she was accustomed to.

  How often had she called him a diamond in the rough? At first he’d taken it as a compliment. Later, he’d realized what the term really meant. Judith hadn’t fallen in love with him, but with the man she thought he might become with her tutoring.

  They’d married way too fast. Maybe she’d done it to thwart her parents, who were every bit as pushy as she was. All he knew was, it didn’t take long before brawn and good sex weren’t enough for her. She’d wanted him to make a success of himself. She’d wanted to take him to parties and family dinners and be able to brag about what a catch he’d turned out to be.

  But he’d bristled at her attempts to change him. He didn’t want to earn his GED, didn’t see the point in it. He hadn’t wanted to dress differently, or have his hair cut by some snotty hairdresser, or go into management at some gargantuan construction corporation. He didn’t want to “better himself.”

  At one point, he thought she’d finally seen the light and accepted him for who he was. But actually she’d given up. She’d found herself another studly “project” but hadn’t bothered to inform Travis that their marriage was over.

  Elena wasn’t as snobby as Judith, but clearly she’d left her humble beginnings far behind. She was a doctor’s daughter, and she worked for one of the richest men in the country. He would never be her equal.

  She was helping him, and he truly was grateful for that. But if two people were going to get involved, they should start on equal footing. So far Elena had done all the giving, and he’d done all the taking. How could he give back? What did he have that she needed?

  Then there was the fact that he’d kidnapped her. How did anyone ever overcome something like that?

  “We better get back to work,” he said gruffly.

  She nodded. As soon as he cleaned up the dishes, they resumed their positions on the floor and Elena opened her laptop.

  Before they could get to the next part of the form, Elena’s phone rang. She dragged it out of her purse and squinted at the screen. A puzzled look crossed her face.

  “Something wrong?”

  “It’s Daniel.”

  * * *

  ELENA’S STOMACH SWOOPED. Should she pick up? She didn’t trust herself to talk to her boss without losing it; her emotions were still too close to the surface where Daniel Logan was concerned.

  What if he’d found out she was using her contacts at Project Justice for her own selfish interests and those of Travis Riggs?

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Travis asked.

  “Should I?”

  “Yes, of course! Y’all need to work through whatever’s bugging you and get things back to normal.”

  She hesitated another moment before answering, because curiosity got the better of her. “Yes, Daniel?” She was irritated that her voice cracked.

  Travis stood and moved to the other side of the room, giving her some privacy. He picked up a scraping tool and began working on some peeling decals on the front windows.

  “Elena. Thank you for taking my call.” Daniel sounded oddly formal. Normally he didn’t waste time on polite salutations. He simply issued orders and expected her to follow them.

  She said nothing, just waited for him to tell her why he’d called.

  “I’ve been going over the Eric Riggs case,” he began.

  “Oh?”

  “You know I don’t like being backed into a corner, and I had every intention of forgetting all about Eric Riggs.”

  “But you couldn’t,” she said softly.

  “No. His brother might be a lowlife bottom-feeder, but that’s not Eric’s fault. The case kept nagging at me. Even after you were back safe, I just kept thinking about Eric and his little girl, whom he’ll never see again if something isn’t done.”

  Elena’s heart thumped wildly behind her sternum. At one time she had predicted Daniel might be unable to resist following up on the Riggs case, but that was before she’d argued with him. Now, she was frankly surprised that he would concern himself. His grudge against Travis was strong enough that Elena had figured he wouldn’t do anything to further Travis’s cause, even if the cops had used rubber hoses to beat a confession out of Eric Riggs.

  “So, is Project Justice going to take on the case?”

  From the corner of her eye, Elena saw Travis go still. Obviously he could still hear her side of the conversation. She’d have put the phone on speaker and let him hear the whole thing if doing so wouldn’t have alerted Daniel that she wasn’t alone.

  “I’d like to work on the case, yes,” Daniel said. “There were so many holes in that trial, so many mistakes made during the investigation. I can think of at least five directions the cops could have gone and didn’t because they were so sure right from the start that Eric did it.”

  “That’s fantastic!”

  “No, wait, not so fantastic. Number one, I can’t officially take on the case without an application. The foundation has pretty strict rules about that.”

  “That’s not a problem. In fact, we—that is, Travis is working on that now. You should have it by the end of the day.”

  Daniel didn’t ask how Elena knew this. “Okay. Second problem—I don’t have any investigators to spare. We’ve got a backlog. Since Eric isn’t on death row, his case can’t take priority over some others that are more urgent.”

  “So when would you get to it?”

  “Probably not for three months or so.”

 
Damn. “Eric’s daughter might be adopted by then.”

  “I can have someone from my personal legal team look into that. Since it’s not directly related to the criminal case, it doesn’t have to go through the foundation or follow the established protocol. We can treat it as a separate matter.”

  “You would do that?”

  “Of course. I don’t want an innocent man to lose his little girl. But there’s something Travis should do if he wants to prevent the child from being adopted. Because even if the current foster parents aren’t approved, there are three other couples waiting in the wings to adopt her.”

  Elena hadn’t known that, and she doubted Travis did, either. Even if the judge threw the book at the Stovers for selling MacKenzie’s things online, it would only buy them a little bit of time.

  Probably not enough.

  “What does Travis need to do? I’m sure he’ll do anything!”

  “I’m sure he’ll do anything, too,” Daniel said drily. “But what he needs to do is petition the court to adopt MacKenzie himself. I understand that’s what Eric wanted.”

  “Oh. I’m not sure... He said...” She lowered her voice. “He said he didn’t think he’d be an appropriate guardian. You know, because of his, um...” She dropped her voice. “His criminal record.”

  “Elena,” Daniel said sharply. “Is Travis there with you?”

  She’d never wanted to lie so badly in her life. But she couldn’t very well lie to Daniel when she had made a big fuss over Daniel lying to her.

  “Yes, he’s here.”

  Long silence. “What the hell is going on with you? No, never mind. None of my business what you do when you’re not on the clock.”

  Thank God. Because she didn’t know how she could explain it to him when she didn’t understand it herself.

  “Maybe Travis isn’t an ideal parent,” Daniel said, getting back to business. “But as the girl’s closest noninstitutionalized relative, he’ll have a shot. He’ll have to prove he can take care of her, of course. Does he have the means for childcare? He needs to live someplace with a separate bedroom for the child.”