Bonnie denied it to Margaret, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. And my memories…
I couldn’t be remembering things right.
I looked over at Xander. He was sleeping soundly on his side, his breaths coming in slow, steady puffs of air. I touched his shoulder, my fingers tracing a pattern over his warm skin. He didn’t move; he didn’t respond at all. Poor man was exhausted. The last six months had been much more difficult than either of us could have imagined.
I pressed my lips to his shoulder and climbed out of bed, dressing in his discarded shirt—I loved having the scent of him surrounding me!—and a pair of sweats I’d left behind in the closet. I left the room quietly, closing the door with as much care as possible.
I needed to talk to Philip. I needed to know if my memories were playing games with me.
My whole world turned upside down when I caught Xander with those papers—papers with Grant Wallace’s signature on them—and heard the story he had to tell.
Chapter 25
Xander-Six Months Ago…
I walked into the bedroom to find her taking her clothes out of the closet and piling them on the bed. My heart was in my throat as I tried to explain that the snafu at the county clerk’s office was easily remedied. We could still get married and live out our dreams. I was hanging on to that notion.
“Harley, it’s a mistake. I’ll get it cleared up, and we’ll get our marriage license just like we planned.”
“I don’t think I want to marry a man who would lie to me.”
“It wasn’t a lie.”
“It was an omission. That’s the same thing.”
“You told me not to tell you. Do you remember that?”
She tossed a handful of clothes on the bed before she turned to me, her hands on her hips.
“You are not blaming this on me!”
“You didn’t want to know about my past; you didn’t want to know about the women in my life.”
“I wasn’t talking about marriages! You made me believe that I was the first woman in your life whom you wanted to marry, but now I found out that you were married before—”
“To a friend! To someone who needed help escaping a bad situation. It was not a love match.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Yes. Because you love me and you trust me.”
“How can I trust you when you lied to me about something so important?”
“You’ve got to stop, Harley,” I said, grabbing her arms and pulling her over to the bed. I only wanted to force her to sit, but she fought back and tried to pull away. She ripped at my arms and tore at my shirt. The papers fell out in a shower of insanity. I’d forgotten about them; I’d forgotten the most dangerous thing I’d ever done because of the threat of losing the only thing that had ever mattered to me.
She went still as she watched the last of them fall.
“What the…?”
I bent to grab them, but she’d already knelt, grabbing a few incriminating pieces of paper before I could stop her.
“Where did you get these?”
I tried to take them from her, but she held them so tightly that they would have torn if I’d continued to fight her. So I picked up the others and stood, crossing the room as I tried to figure out what to say.
“This one has Grant’s signature on it.”
I knew that. That’s why I took it.
“And this one…is that your mom’s signature? Xander? What’s going on?”
I could hear the shock and disbelief in her voice. I wished I’d felt the same when I realized just how deeply involved they were. But I couldn’t, because I really wasn’t surprised.
I slid the folder out from under my shirt where I’d thought sticking it into the top of my pants would keep it secure—like I was some sort of spy from the 1950s. I had the same information on a flash drive in my pocket, but those didn’t have signatures on them. They said they needed signatures, the one time in this automated society when an electronic signature wouldn’t do.
I tossed it all onto the low table in front of the television and sat heavily on the loveseat.
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I had never wanted to tell her; I never wanted to get her involved. But it was becoming more and more obvious that there was no other way.
“I always knew that Grant skirted that line, the line between right and wrong. I knew a lot of his business dealings were questionable. But, you know, that’s the way it is with lawyers in this town.”
“But these…” Harley waved the papers in the air in front of me. “These are—”
“I know. I found out about this a year ago.”
It was a new client. His name was Randall Thomas, and he owned a technology company with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. It was a huge contract that would push my fledgling company into a company with a solid future. Randy had friends in high places, friends who told him things. And he shared a few of those things with me over lunch one afternoon.
“Your mom works for Grant Wallace, right?”
“She does.”
“For a long time?”
I set my wine glass down and looked over at Randy. We’d been talking about football a moment ago, so the change in subject was a little jarring.
“Since I was a toddler. Why?”
Randy looked down at his plate for a moment, as though weighing his next words. “I’m not really at liberty to talk about such things,” he said in a slow, deliberate tone, “but you’ve proved to be an honest man in our business dealings, and I would feel like a hypocrite if I didn’t say something.”
“Alright,” I said, wondering what the hell he was getting at.
“A friend of mine works with Homeland Security. And he’s mentioned a new investigation taking place in Los Angeles. Something to do with business deals involving members of ISIS.”
He didn’t need to say much more. And he didn’t. But the look he gave said more than words ever could.
An FBI agent called me a few days later.
“They told me that they’d been monitoring communications coming into and going out of Grant’s office for some time, but Grant was too smart, too careful. They couldn’t prove anything.”
“They asked you to help.”
I ran my palms over the top of my pants, wiping away the sweat that always gathered there when I thought about these things. It made me sick to my stomach and wish that I’d never gone to that lunch with Randy, that I’d never agreed to take on his contract. But I had and now I had to deal with the fallout.
“I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought that maybe it was a misunderstanding. The government had become so paranoid since the attacks on the eleventh of September. They saw conspiracies where none had ever existed. I wanted to believe that was what was happening now.”
“But…”
I looked at Harley and remembered how all I wanted during that time was to go to her in Texas and forget about all of this. I even considered giving up my business, leaving behind all my friends and my mom, leaving everything behind to be with her and run from this craziness.
“I began investigating on my own. Grant was one of my first customers in the security firm. I did something I swore I would never do. I used my software to look around Grant’s computers and used my cameras to watch footage of the late night comings and goings of the people at his firm. And when that didn’t reveal anything truly incriminating, I used my access to install other software that he never agreed to. Spyware that could find things that Grant could never hide—no matter how smart or how inventive he was. Things the government would never find through legal channels.”
“They’re using you.” Harley gasped, as though she still believed in an honest and paternal government. “They set you up because they knew what you would do.”
“And I fell headlong into their trap.”
She sat beside me and slid her
hand into mine.
“Are they guilty?”
I nodded. “Grant is helping some members of ISIS buy up real estate here in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago for reasons I can’t begin to guess. And he’s making it all look perfectly legal.”
“Does he know who…?”
“Grant is a very intelligent man. And he’s taking a hell of a lot of money for these transactions, so much more than he would normally charge. So, yeah, I’d guess he knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“And Homeland Security is trying to stop whatever ISIS is planning.”
“They are. And they’re using me to do it.” I again ran my hands over the leg of my pants. “I don’t think they’re just after Grant. I think they want to convince him to give details about the people he’s working with so they can get to them. Either way, of course, Grant’s going down.”
“And your mom, too.”
“And Mom, too.”
“And you?”
That was the one thing I’d recently begun to understand. The man I was dealing with at Homeland Security—or the FBI, I wasn’t sure which—was beginning to make me nervous with his demands. Grabbing the physical copies of property deeds and other contracts was so dangerous that it should have been a last ditch effort—especially since I’d given them reams of electronic data that should have been enough to leverage Grant.
“I don’t know. If Grant knew what I was doing…”
Harley took my hand and tugged it into her lap. “We can’t just sit back and let someone else run this whole thing for us. We have to have some control.”
“This doesn’t involve you. I’ve tried very hard—”
“I’m your fiancée,” she said, touching my face so that we were looking into each other’s eyes. “What affects you, affects me.”
I kissed her, wishing it wasn’t true. But I was also glad to finally have this burden off my shoulders, to finally be able to share it with someone.
“We have to do this our way,” she said a minute later. “The first thing we’re going to do is put these papers in my safe and keep them.”
“What about my contact?”
“Tell him you couldn’t get them. And then tell him you’ve had second thoughts about this whole thing.”
“He won’t like that. He’s already threatened me with jail time if I don’t cooperate fully.”
“But what’s he going to get you on? You aren’t involved.”
“It’s the government. They can do whatever they want.”
“I’m gonna call Philip. His father just got elected to the Senate. He’ll know someone who can help us.”
“Harley—”
“And we’ll have to break up.”
“What? Wait a minute!” I climbed to my feet, my eyes moving to the pile of clothes still sitting on the bed. “I thought we were past all that?”
“We are.” She was almost laughing, as she took hold of the front of my shirt and made me look at her. “We are. It’s only for appearances.”
“Why?”
“You’re going to tell Grant and your mother that I stumbled across some information in your office, and you think I might use it against them to hurt you because of our bad breakup.”
I studied her, wondering if she was completely insane or the smartest woman I’d ever met.
“That way, if they know what you’ve been doing, they’ll think I’m behind it.”
“Harley, I can’t let you do that.”
“You can and you will. That’s the only way we can protect you.”
“And what about you?”
“You’ll watch over me. So will Philip.”
I groaned because the idea of relying on her ex-boyfriend—the one who hurt her so badly that it took months for me to win her trust—and getting him involved in this was just unappetizing. But I was beginning to see her logic. The more she talked…
This had to work out the way she said it would. Or things would never be the same again.
Chapter 26
Harley-Present Day
I slipped into Xander’s office and closed the door. Behind a couple of books on a high shelf were some burner phones that I’d given Xander when all this began. I took one out to the garden when the sun was just beginning to rise in the eastern sky.
Philip’s phone number was one of the first things that came back to me in total detail.
“Harley? Is that really you?”
“It is.”
“How are you? Xander called and told me you’d been hurt, that you had no memory of the last three years!”
“Yeah, well, things have a way of changing.”
“That’s great!”
“Listen, Philip,” I said, as I paced in among the rose bushes. “I think we have a problem. Who have you talked to about our plan?”
“Only the people I told you about.”
“That guy at Homeland Security and the CIA agent, right?”
“Right. Why?”
I didn’t answer right away. My thoughts were whirling, as I tried to work out everything I knew and everything that was slowly coming back to me. There were still a few blank spots in my memory, mostly minor things that likely would never come back—like I couldn’t remember where we were the last time Philip and I met in person, but I could remember there was food involved. However, those blanks made some of the other things I did remember seem suspect. So I had to do this carefully.
“The reporter…?”
“Colin Francis. He’s still in Los Angeles. In fact, I talked to him last night, and he said he saw you at some party?”
“Why didn’t he know about my accident?”
“Because Xander and I thought it would be best if no one knew about it since we had no clue who actually ran you down. We thought publicity about the whole thing might put you in danger, so Xander pulled some strings, I had my dad pull some strings, and the story appeared at the back of the lifestyles section of the paper and didn’t make it to the online version.”
“What did he think happened? That I chickened out?”
“Yeah. We didn’t know what else to do.”
“Call him. Tell him I want to talk to him today.”
“Is that really a good idea, Harley? Have you talked to Xander about this?”
“We need to finish this before someone else gets hurt.”
Philip was silent for a minute. And then I heard him sigh on the other end of the phone.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll set it up.”
I sat on the back porch in a small, wicker chair that I bought myself not long after moving in with Xander to wait. If my suspicions were right, it wouldn’t be a long wait.
I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that I’d lost an entire three years of my life. It was kind of surreal, like one of those movies when a guy plays around with time travel and suddenly returns to the present with new memories implanting themselves in his mind. I still felt like the stupid girl who couldn’t remember Xander and everything that happened to me just before and after my college graduation. The things that forced me to grow up and become the somewhat jaded person I’d become. But I now remembered the girl I became because of those experiences. But I wasn’t completely her again. I was something different; I was a mixture of the two, born out of the experiences I’d had since I woke from my coma.
It’s hard to explain. I knew who I was and where I belonged. But I wasn’t who I had been two and half months ago when that car hit me.
Whether that change was for the better or the worse remained to be seen.
I ran my fingers over my super-short hair and watched the birds come out to play, as the sun came fully into the morning sky. I loved it out here; I loved this house, this garden. The moment Xander first brought me here, I fell in love with it all. It seemed surreal that I would forget all that. But I hadn’t, had I? I sensed a kinship with this place—even when I couldn’t remember the long hours I’d spent out here with a sketchpad in my lap or an easel s
et up in front of me. Just like when I defied my father and stayed here with Xander; some part of me remembered that Xander was the love of my life and I had no reason not to trust him.
The women in his life, on the other hand…
I thought I heard a gate squeak. It briefly crossed my mind that it was unwise to be out here without some sort of weapon, but then it was too late.
“I figured you’d be out here.”
Chapter 27
Xander
I rolled over to reach for Harley, but she wasn’t there. I groaned, wondering if she was in the bathroom. She was a fairly light sleeper, and she was in and out of bed a dozen times most nights. I used to tease her about her tiny bladder, but she joked back that it would be good practice for when our first baby came. She figured after that, she’d learn to sleep a little better and the second one would be my problem.
I was ready to live out that fantasy.
I closed my eyes and thought about the past twenty hours or so. One minute I’m trying to keep my hands off my own wife, the next I’m making love to her like the past few months had never happened. Talk about your whirlwinds.
When she told me we had to pretend to break up, I was determined to talk her out of it. What good would it do for us to be miserable if we were just going to end up going to jail? I couldn’t see any way out of the situation I’d gotten myself into with Grant and the whole terrorism thing. The federal agent I’d been talking to was clearly trying to find a way to drag me into the middle of everything—just like Harley said. And the fact that I’d installed illegal software on Grant’s computers was enough for them to put me away for at least ten years.
But her plan was brilliant. That is, until she got hit by a car.
KILLIAN: A Mafia Romance (The Callahans Book 2) Page 29