Torrid - Book One

by Jayne Blue

  They had to be.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jack

  Less than twenty-four hours from now, Tora planned to walk down the aisle and marry a man I was certain she didn’t love. Two weeks ago, I didn’t give a rat’s ass. Now, it was the only thing on my mind.

  I hadn’t slept since Tora left. I wanted to see her again. I wanted to get her to tell me why. What desperate secret kept her tied to Seth? It wasn’t money. Was it power? Did she actually think Seth would get elected? Did she just want to be a senator’s wife? It didn’t seem like the Tora I thought I was getting to know. The more I puzzled it out, the more a sinking pit formed in my gut. I was convinced that Tora’s plan to marry Seth couldn’t be her own choice.

  I needed to get her alone again. Whatever plan she had, I saw her resolve unraveling in her eyes the other night. She didn’t want this. Which meant Seth had something on her. It was the only thing that made any sense.

  I grabbed my phone and texted R.J.

  Need to talk. Need answers on that little side project I gave you.

  I put the phone down and finished getting dressed. I’d go to Seth’s ridiculous rehearsal dinner. I’d keep up the charade until I found my chance to talk to Tora. Also, watching Seth try to schmooze the power players he invited would provide added side entertainment.

  My phone buzzed and I picked it up.

  Got lots of ’em. Following up on something this afternoon. You going to the shindig?

  I texted back. Yep.

  R.J. answered. K. We’ll talk there.

  I felt a pit form in my stomach. Was it guilt? Probably. Whatever R.J. found was probably the exact thing Seth was using to keep her tied to him. She asked me to trust her and this sure as hell wasn’t that. But something big had upset her the other night when she came to my door. If Seth was behind it ... if Miranda had been behind it ... she might need me more than she realized. Maybe I could give her another chance to come clean before I talked to R.J. Except I didn’t know how to reach her before that.

  I picked up my phone and dialed Seth’s number. He answered on the second ring.

  “Jack.” His tone was flat.

  “Hey, Seth,” I said. I knew what he probably suspected. I hadn’t heard from Reed so no settlement had been reached. I would have let Seth squirm a little longer but something else mattered more at the moment.

  “I’ll be there tonight,” I said. He let out an audible breath.

  “Good, Jack. That’s really good. We need to keep a united front. I’ve got ...”

  “Seth,” I cut him off. “Whatever, okay? I don’t want to talk political strategy right now. This is something more personal. I don’t have a gift for you yet. I need to ask Tora a question if you don’t mind. Is she there with you right now?”

  Silence. Then something muffled as Seth held his hand over the phone.

  “She’s right here,” Seth answered and my blood ran hot. She was with him still. They’d been intimate maybe.

  I waited a moment.

  “Yes, Jack?” Tora’s voice was steady, guarded. She spoke through what I now knew was her mask of a smile.

  “I’m asking you about ideas for a wedding gift, got it?” I said.

  “That’s really sweet, Jack. You supporting Seth is really gift enough.”

  Sure, the fucker.

  “I need to see you again. Can you figure out how to make that happen?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s already got one of those. That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I need to see you and you want to see me. We need to talk.”

  “Sorry I can’t be more help, Jack. Don’t worry about it, though. I’m afraid I need to get going. I’ve got another fitting before tomorrow.”

  “Is he threatening you? Is that it? Tora. You need to let me know what’s going on.”

  Silence. Then I heard Tora’s breath catch. I was getting to her.

  “I’m not going to let him hurt you. But you have to let me in. Okay?”

  “Talk to you soon, Jack. Thanks again for thinking of us.”

  Then she hung up the phone.

  ***

  Four hours later, I drove up Miranda’s tree-lined drive. Each one had perfectly spaced white Christmas lights leading the way. I felt a pang in my gut at a memory long buried. Years ago, when my father first drove my mother here, I remember she had wanted to do that sometime.

  Just think how pretty they’d look all lit up, Jackson?

  Just think how much of a pain in the ass it will be getting them that way?

  It was a ruse. He would have hung each bulb individually plus the moon itself if she asked him to and they both knew it.

  After tonight, I hoped I’d never have to step foot on this property again. As I walked into the grand foyer, an Amazon of a blonde rushed forward and grabbed my arm. She wore her hair cropped short and her hands were as big as mine as she clamped one on my shoulder. Amazon wasn’t right; she was more of a Viking Shield Maiden.

  “You’re twenty minutes late!” she snapped.

  “Okay.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s a wedding rehearsal. I’m told you’re the best man.”

  “Rrright. Exactly what are we rehearsing? We stand in the living room, bride walks down the stairs. Isn’t that pretty much it?”

  I got a bigger eye roll. “It’s all about appearances, Mr. Manning. Are you unaware of how important this event is for your brother?” I let that one go. I wasn’t really here for Seth, after all. I was here for Tora and the truth, however I could get it.

  The Ice Maiden led me into Miranda’s great room. The furniture had been cleared out and replaced with ten rows of gold-backed chairs, separated down the middle to form an aisle. Seth stood at the end of it chewing his thumbnail. He straightened when he saw me and I walked toward him.

  What a weird little gathering. Rehearsal dinners were for family. Miranda had one distant cousin. He was a little weasel named Martin ... I think. He stood next to Seth and narrowed his black weasel eyes when he saw me. The first few rows of chairs were filled with some of the lawyers I recognized from Seth’s office. Reed and R.J. were here. I leaned down next to Reed and reached across him to take Margie Burnett’s hand. I kissed it and she gave me a smile while keeping her eyes narrowed. I was in trouble, I knew. I had yet to make it to her house for that tuna casserole.

  Everyone in the room was connected to Seth or Miranda in some way. As far as I could tell, no one in the room belonged to Tora. And she was nowhere to be found.

  “Good,” Seth said, reaching out to slap me on the shoulder. “We can get started. Then we can move on to the food and alcohol in the other room.”

  The Ice Maiden, who I had by now surmised was Seth’s event planner, cued music from a switch on the wall. Pachelbel’s Canon in D by string quartet filled the room. “We’ll have the real deal here tomorrow,” Ice Maiden said. “Just to give you the feel.”

  I took my place at Seth’s shoulder and was shocked to find R.J. standing on the other side. We were Seth’s groomsmen? Did the man have not one friend of his own? Why the hell didn’t Tora?

  Then she was here. She stood in the doorway to the foyer holding a single red rose. She wore a green dress that hugged her hips and matched her eyes, her hair swept up. Tora caught my eyes and her mask of a smile faltered. She took a step forward, then another, her back straight, her feet sure. She brushed past me on her way to Seth; her perfume stirred a memory. The same scent still lingered on my bed sheets.

  One of Miranda’s colleagues would officiate the services tomorrow. Chief Judge Ramer, some voice in the back of my mind recalled. A stodgy old white man covered in more liver spots than hair. He said words. Then Seth did. I couldn’t lure my focus away from the curve of Tora’s shoulder, the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck that had sprung free from the sleek ponytail she wore.

  And then it was over. The Ice Maiden, who Tora called Liv, told us we were done. Seth pulled Tora against him and kissed h
er neck. I dug my fists into my thighs. We moved out to the veranda overlooking Miranda’s over-the-top garden and hedge maze. Liv had set up a bar and finger foods buffet-style out on the lawn. People ate and drank. Seth tried to be charming. Failed. Tora stayed close to him and I waited.

  Seth really was terrible at this. He laughed too hard at his own jokes, he made odd faces and I noticed the left eye twitch he’d had since he was a kid was worse tonight. He was uncomfortable and obvious while he tried to win over the lawyers, judges, close friends and business people he thought would help finance his campaign. He coughed loud at one point and stepped away from the crowd. He reached into his breast pocket, cupped his hand over his mouth and swallowed. The idiot just palmed pills. No one was watching except for me, but anyone paying attention would have seen it. He washed them down with a swig of his martini. He turned and headed back into the crowd.

  Finally, while Seth chatted up the senior Mr. Crane of the Crane Law Firm, I found an opening and went to Tora’s side.

  “We need to talk,” I whispered at her ear while reaching over her to grab a shrimp.

  “We don’t,” she said and it took me off guard.

  “I’ll make a scene if I have to,” I said.

  “No, you won’t,” she said, moving away from me. She caught the eye of Judge Ramer and made an exaggerated gesture of hello to him. Ramer was old, heterosexual and, from the dagger-like stare of his wife, blind. When he hugged Tora, I saw his hand slide across her ass before she could dodge it. She might pretend she didn’t want it, but another minute and she was going to need help with an extraction.

  “Jack.” R.J. was at my side. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to call you before we got here. I had a little ... uh ... field trip to take pertaining to your favor.” R.J. tipped his rocks glass toward Tora. “You think anyone would notice if we slipped out for a few minutes?”

  Judge Ramer rubbed a hand across Tora’s shoulder and then Seth was at her side. I didn’t want to leave her but something in R.J.’s voice sounded urgent and ominous. We went back into the house. As far as I could tell, everyone was already outside. I kept an eye out for Miranda’s creepy housekeeper but the hallways were empty. I led R.J. back to Miranda’s study, my mind’s eye flashing to the last time I was here ... with Tora bent over the desk.

  “Whatcha got, R.J.?” I asked. I let him into the room ahead of me, took one more look out in the hall and then closed the door behind us.

  “I gotta say I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get something for you. And for the eleventh-hour stuff. I just had to make sure I was as right as I could be.”

  “How right are you?” I asked, a chill starting to form in my gut.

  “One hundred percent,” R.J. said, his mouth a grim line.

  “Okay.” I crossed my arms. “So what is it? Is she a serial killer? Has a secret love child with Justin Bieber? What’s going on?”

  R.J. leaned against Miranda’s desk in the exact spot where Tora had. I made a move forward to tell him not to sit there but couldn’t decide how. I left it alone.

  “I’m gonna tell you what I know and how I found it. I think both are just as important.” He pulled his oversized smart phone out of his breast pocket. “I’ve got a paper file back at the office, but I scanned some of the highlights.”

  “R.J.!”

  He looked up. “Yeah, right. Pretty much the chick is lying about everything, Jack. And I mean everything. She’s good. For sure. So she’s probably got somebody bigger helping her, but she’s a con artist. One hundred percent.”

  I felt nothing. Not shock, not anger. Not at first.

  R.J. went on. “For starters, her name isn’t Tora Blake. It’s Victoria McLain. I almost didn’t find it. She’s very, very good, Jack. But she got sloppy. If you hadn’t asked me to tail her, too, we probably still wouldn’t know that. She paid with a credit card at the Four Seasons the other night. You and Seth were with her. I had eyes on her that night.”

  “Right,” I said. “I told Seth I wasn’t going to help him with his campaign unless he signed my dad’s software rights back to me. It didn’t look like he was going to so I left. Nice. So he apparently stuck her with the check.”

  R.J. nodded. “I figured it was something like that. Anyway, my assistant got the slip from the waiter. After that, everything pretty much broke wide open. If you hadn’t pissed Seth off that night, well ...”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what?

  “Look,” R.J. said. “This is awkward, okay? We’re friends. You’re into her, I get that. We’ve been tailing her, remember?”

  The tail that I set up led R.J. to my hotel room at least once.

  “So who’s Victoria McLain then?” I asked. I wouldn’t apologize or explain my own behavior to R.J. He was friend enough not to ask me to.

  “That was hard to puzzle out too,” R.J. continued. “It’s not a particularly unique name. Nothing about the Tora Blake story checked out except for when she entered the picture in Seth’s life. She got hired as a filing clerk at the Crane Firm. When she started getting close to Seth, Miranda got wind of it and called in some favors. Got Tora canned. But she’d already gotten her hooks into Seth pretty hard. And you already know how that turned out on account of we’re standing here today.”

  I nodded.

  “But,” R.J. said, “she might be good at coming up with a believable back story. And I don’t think Miranda knew any of the truth about her. She suspected. She called me. Miranda did. I think I told you that. You and Miranda were on the same page about her. Suspicious, I mean.”

  “R.J.,” I said, trying to keep my temper even, “who the fuck is Victoria McLain?” R.J. flinched and put a hand to his lips to quiet me.

  “She’s nobody,” he said. “Yet. And there are thousands of Victoria McLains. If it weren’t for the tail, we wouldn’t have been able to connect those dots either. A couple of days ago, though, Tora took a day trip. We followed her to Union Station and she got on a bus.”

  “Where?”

  R.J. pulled something up on his phone and handed it to me. I took it but couldn’t look at it yet. I wanted to hear the rest of it first.

  “Marion Penitentiary,” R.J. said. “Now I can’t tell you how. I’ve got my own sources to protect, but we know who she visited.”

  I looked down at the phone. There was Tora, wearing her Northwestern t-shirt and leather bomber jacket as she walked. At her back were high cement walls topped with barbed wire. She was looking down, her hand covering her mouth. The next picture was the same but zoomed in on Tora’s face. Her eyes were red rimmed, her face lined with emotion. I knew from the clothes she wore in the picture, later that day she came to me. She had still been crying as she waited outside my hotel room door.

  I flipped to the next picture. A mugshot. Cold eyes stared back at me from the black and white photo. Handsome bastard with thick dark hair and squared jaw. He gave the camera a James Dean-esque fuck-you face, holding the ID card up with one middle finger extended.

  “Declan McLain,” R.J. said. He had come around and stood peering over my shoulder. “This one was for aggravated assault. Damn near killed some guy in a bar fight. He got convicted of something a hell of a lot worse. He’s doing life on drug charges. Kingpin stuff. Racketeering. Doesn’t look like one, does he? Looks more like an underwear model or something.”

  “What’s he to Tora?” I said. My throat had gone dry.

  R.J. put a hand on my back. “She’s probably his wife, Jack.”

  My head reeled. None of it made any sense. What did any of this have to do with Seth? I was a fool, probably. But none of this tracked. It didn’t feel like the Tora I was coming to know.

  R.J. had known me long enough to sense some of what I was thinking. Maybe it was the set of my shoulders. Maybe he read something in my eyes as I scrolled through the pictures again. Tora in pain. Tora’s lies. Tora’s husband?

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” R.J. said. “If she got to you too, I mean. You didn’t give her any
money or anything did you?”

  “Did I what?” I said. “No. We just ...”

  “I get it,” R.J. cut me off. “Look, you don’t owe me any explanations. She’s good at what she does. I kinda gotta give her credit for that. And it’s not like Seth didn’t have it coming a little bit. He’s been riding Miranda’s coattails and being an overall douche his whole life. Honestly, I don’t even think he’s that crazy about her. She looks good in the pictures. He brags an awful lot about how good she is when she spreads her legs. He likes to show her off and she lets him.”

  I shook my head.

  “No harm no foul,” R.J. said. “Though he probably doesn’t deserve you saving his ass. I kinda want to be a fly on the wall when you tell him his fiancé really is just the gold-digging whore Miranda thought she was. I just wish I’d finished what Miranda started before she tried to lure you in, too.”

  Something behind me. Some tiny noise made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I turned.

  The door was open now and Tora stood there in that knockout green dress against her pale skin. Her eyes flashed fire as her mouth dropped. I don’t know how long she’d been there but long enough to hear at least the last bit.

  R.J. turned a beat after I did and was the first one to say anything. “Shit!”

  Chapter Twenty One

  Tora

  It was easier than you might think when I went back to the party. I’d never been to a rehearsal dinner before, much less my own so I didn’t know how long they were supposed to last. By eight o’clock, the house had cleared and even Jack was long gone. I didn’t know what to say to him then. What could I say?

  Gold-digging whore.

  I’d heard it before from worse and better than R.J. Burnett and why wouldn’t Jack believe it? It just wasn’t gold I was after.

  I should have left it like that. Miranda’s files were finally in my suitcase and all I had to do was leave. Seth would never find me. Tora Blake didn’t exist. The only thing that kept me here now was the belief – however niggling it was – that I had overlooked something. That there was something even bigger staring me in the face.