Redeemed: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance (Lost Love Book 1)

by Marcella Swann

  “It isn’t for booty calls, that’s just a fringe benefit,” I said. Before Cynthia could come up with anything to say to that, her phone rang. My heart beat a bit faster with the thought that it might be another threatening call.

  “It’s Nate,” Cynthia said, before taking the call and putting it on speaker. “It’s me, and you’re on speaker. I’m with Shawn.”

  “I’ve got some news,” Nathan said. “It’s not good news.”

  “I wasn’t expecting good news,” I told them both.

  “Me either, really--not at this point,” Cynthia agreed. “Go on, Nate.”

  “So it looks like there’s some chatter amongst the feds,” Nathan said. “And this chatter is focused on you, Shawn. Apparently the DA has some concerns about the embezzlement, thinks it’s outside his paygrade. Whoever is after your Dad has some serious clout and wants him out of the way in a serious way. And now they want you out of the way too.”

  “How exactly did you track that down?” I could almost see Cynthia’s friend grinning.

  “A bit of snooping and a bit of talking to people,” Nathan replied. “In essence, they’re looking at coming after Shawn Peterson Junior for conspiracy charges. They think there’s no way that Senior could do what he’s accused of doing without help, or without Shawn being involved at all.” I saw Cynthia’s eyes widening slightly and watched her shake her head, her expression turning thoughtful.

  “Thanks, Nate,” she said after a moment. “Anything else we need to know?”

  “I’m tracking some stuff down,” Nathan said. “You’re in a safe place, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m hidden away,” Cynthia said. I noticed that she didn’t say where she was hidden.

  “Take care of yourself, I’ll call you when I see if my hunch on a couple of things pays off.”

  “If I need anything I’ll call,” Cynthia told him, and then hung up the phone. She looked at me for a moment. “Looks like I need to get back to work.”

  Chapter Nine

  It took me a little over a day of being stuck at Shawn’s apartment, working on the information I could get remotely, before I wanted to go into the office. Shawn kept his promise and did not make a move on me, but I could feel the tension between us. We ate meals together, and he did some kind of business stuff remotely while I pored over his father’s case and the other information I had, and there was almost a visible ripple in the air between us. I didn’t want to constantly be around Shawn; I hated that every moment reminded me, simultaneously, of how good things had been between us and how heartbroken I’d been when they ended. I hated it even more that I couldn’t shake off the more recent memories of sleeping with him after we’d fought off the attackers who were after us. Sex had no business being that good.

  Shawn somehow had managed to convince himself that it was safe for him to leave, even if it wasn’t safe for me. So, when he’d gone to his own office to do something that was about as clear as mud to me, I decided I would take my chances and get in touch with Jack. There were just some things I could do more effectively from my own space, especially since I wouldn’t be obsessing about Shawn there.

  Jack drove me around town, taking the least obvious route he could to get to my office. Since Harrison knew about the fire at my place and about the attack on me and Shawn at Shawn’s building, I had full clearance to be away from the office. I could keep whatever hours I wanted, as long as the money continued to come in.

  “I want to check on something,” Jack told me, as he prepared to drop me off at the door. “You’re going to be okay inside, right?” I nodded. Ever since I’d let the senior partners know about the fire, they’d increased security. It probably wasn’t as good as having Jack nearby, but it would be harder for someone to get to me in my office.

  “I’ll text you before I go anywhere,” I told him. I went into the office, straight to my desk and pulled up some of the information Nathan had sent me the night before to see if I could make some calls and get more details. It was proving to be trickier than I thought to prove conclusively that Shawn Peterson Senior hadn’t been the one to make the transfers, and that they weren’t his accounts in the first place. Tracing the movements of the money was something that I knew Nathan could do, in theory; but in practice it was taking longer than I would have liked. So the important thing to me, at that point, was to find out who was behind it.

  And also, of course, to prove that Shawn’s father hadn’t been one of the people involved. I still wasn’t entirely sure I even wanted to believe that the man was innocent, but I’d been trained to set aside personal thoughts and feelings about a client. And a few years of working as a defense attorney had only strengthened this belief. If they were guilty, even if I knew they were guilty, it was my job to believe in their innocence.

  My phone buzzed and my first instinct was to think that it was another threat; my second thought was that it was probably Shawn, wanting to know where I was. Instead of either, I saw it was Jack texting me. I have some information for you. I’ll be up in your office in about 15 minutes. Just want to make sure no one has eyes on me, first.

  That was definitely interesting, and I was more than willing to find out what Jack had for me. He’d mentioned the possibility of seeing what he could see in terms of the people who’d attacked me and Shawn, and the people who had torched my apartment. Apparently my clients were not the only ones with a bit of a finger on the pulse of the darker side of things in the city.

  “So I can’t give you full details, but I have some stuff,” Jack said, as soon as he came into my office and closed the door behind him.

  “I wasn’t expecting anything at all, so whatever you have will be helpful,” I told him.

  “So, I managed to catch up with some guys,” Jack explained, sitting down. “One of the ones who got away--I asked some questions until I tracked down the right people, you know?”

  I nodded. “I appreciate it,” I said. “What did you find out?”

  “If you’ll promise not to go after the guy, I can give you the details he told me,” Jack said. I thought about it. On the one hand, I definitely wanted revenge on the people who had come after me and Shawn. On the other, it was much more important to take out the source.

  “Why do I need to promise not to go after the guy?” I crossed my arms over my chest and held Jack’s gaze.

  “He’s a friend of a friend, as it turns out,” Jack said. “The mutual friend has a soft spot for the guy--wants to hire him. If he lands in jail, that can’t work out.” I thought about it again and decided that knowing was better than not knowing, and knowing sooner rather than later was better than wasting time waiting for the next attack.

  “Okay, I swear I won’t come after him. So tell me,” I said.

  “He doesn’t know much about the situation, I can tell you that right off the bat,” Jack explained. “He can give you the guy who hired him directly, but he told me that he isn’t convinced that’s the guy in charge. But it could be useful for you to track him down, since presumably the person who hired him and the other guys would know who set him on the task, right?” Jack took a folded-over slip of paper out of his wallet and slid it across my desk towards me.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  Jack smiled slightly.

  “I wasn’t where you needed me to be when I needed to be there,” he pointed out. “I consider this a way of making up for that mistake.”

  “I appreciate it,” I told him. “So I guess I should organize with you to meet this guy and see what he’s willing to tell me.” I remembered Shawn; I didn’t even know if he was back at the hideout. He didn’t know where I was, either. In theory, at least, I should probably tell him what I’m going to do, I thought, as I looked at the name and phone number on the slip of paper. But Shawn likely would want to come with me, and I had the instinct that Jack’s friend-of-a-friend wouldn’t be as apt to speak if there were too many people there. Jack had gone out of his way to track the guy down so that I could spea
k with him specifically. I had to honor that. Besides, I thought Jack would be there. I’d be protected. I picked up my office phone to make the call.

  Chapter Ten

  I hadn’t told Cynthia where I’d planned to go that morning, just that I had important business to take care of. Dad had let me know that he was finally being allowed to post bail, which had been tricky considering the charges against him had resulted in his assets being frozen. He said that he would be going home that morning and wanted to talk to me. I needed to find out what Dad wanted to talk about, and I didn’t think I’d get all that far with Cynthia there with me. There was also the issue that she hated him, and I was worried that if she was there with me, the topic of our breakup would come up and that wouldn’t be helpful for anyone involved. It was easier just to take care of what information I could get out of Dad on my own, if I could.

  Dad had his own off-the-grid place to go to that only I knew about, and since this was one of the biggest scandals to ever rock our family, I was pretty sure that was where he’d be holed up. So I headed over, taking the longest route possible in yet another unmarked car. I had never thought that it would come in so handy to have vehicles that didn’t have any links to me.

  “Good to be out of that shithole,” Dad told me, as soon as I came in.

  “It can’t have been that bad,” I pointed out. He grabbed a cup of coffee for me and we sat down. “What have you got going on, now that you’re out?”

  “Well, I can’t do business officially in any capacity until the case is resolved,” Dad pointed out to me. “But I’ve got a few people willing to be go-betweens on some deals I’d been working on when they snatched me up.”

  “Cynthia is working hard at putting together what was done,” I told him. Dad nodded and sipped his own coffee.

  “She looked familiar,” Dad commented. I shrugged.

  “You and I are familiar with a lot of lawyers,” I said.

  “Yeah, but she looked…” Dad shook his head. “She’s too young to be friends in any of my circles.”

  “She’s definitely not a friend of any of your friends,” I agreed.

  “She has a pretty heavy hate-on for me, huh?”

  I chuckled.

  “Yeah, she is never going to be your fan, but with what we’ve paid for her help, she’s working hard at clearing your name, and that’s the important thing.” Dad considered that for a moment or two.

  “Wait. What was that girl you were messing around with in high school?”

  I wanted to groan. I’d hoped to keep that particular connection out of my father’s mind. It was bad enough that of course Cynthia knew about who Dad was. Things were complicated enough. But for Dad to remember my high school ex? That was a problem.

  “Which one?” I’d had a few girlfriends before Cynthia. I’d started dating near the end of middle school. It was a fair question.

  “The one you were all moony about,” Dad said. “The one you threatened to run away from home for. What was her name?”

  “It was Cynthia,” I said, because it was pointless to lie to him about it. Maybe he’d think it was a different Cynthia. I didn’t even want to think about that breakup; it had been one of the most brutal ones of my life.

  “So you went to the girl you dumped to get me cleared?” Dad laughed. “You must have inherited my balls, because that’s not a move your mother would have ever made.” I rolled my eyes.

  “I went to her because she’s the top defense attorney in the state,” I said. “If it had been anyone else, I’d have gone to them.”

  “I remember you telling me that,” Dad told me. “She’s really that good, huh?” I nodded.

  “She’s probably going to be one of the senior partners as soon as one of her bosses retires,” I said. “She’s that fucking good.”

  “If I’d known she’d end up this way, I wouldn’t have made you dump her,” Dad said, with a grin. I shook my head.

  “You would have anyway,” I said. I stared at him for a few moments, meeting his gaze. “Remember?” Dad frowned in confusion for a moment and then his eyes widened and I knew that he did remember. The real reason I’d broken up with Cynthia went beyond him forcing me to--though he’d done that.

  “It was a basic precaution at the time,” Dad pointed out. “Though she sounds tough enough that maybe I underestimated her.”

  “She’s tough enough all right,” I said, remembering the fight we’d been in only a couple of days before. “But I couldn’t put her at risk back then. It was the right choice.” Dad raised an eyebrow.

  “If I could have kept it from happening…” I shrugged, dismissing the thought.

  “You did what you could. And it’s in the past, anyway.” Dad had been after me to dump Cynthia for about two weeks, and I’d threatened to run away rather than obey him. But someone else beat me to making the decision.

  One of Dad’s business associates, or more accurately, one of his rivals, had decided to play hardball with Dad on a particular deal, and he had some men snatch me up when I’d left school one day. It was an early introduction to just how intense Dad’s business really was. And when I’d been returned to him, thankfully unharmed, at least physically, he’d pressed the point that there was no way that a girl like Cynthia was prepared for the world we inhabited. I’d agreed.

  “I still regret that it went down that way,” Dad said. “There used to be a time when kids were off-limits for that kind of shit.”

  “Well, once I wasn’t off-limits anymore, anything would go,” I pointed out. “We ran into some trouble the other day, too.” Dad’s eyes widened again and then he scowled in concern.

  “You obviously came out of it okay,” he said, not quite asking.

  “Cynthia held her own, too,” I told him with a little smile. “Got a knife off of one of the bastards.”

  Dad chuckled. “Sounds like she might have been dating down after all, and not you.”

  I rolled my eyes again, smiling a bit.

  “She still doesn’t have as much money as us,” I said. Dad shrugged.

  “Money isn’t everything. And besides, she’s what? A good two-three years younger than you?” He shrugged again. “But that ship has sailed, even if she did grow up pretty, smart, and tough.”

  “Yeah, it has,” I said, remembering the night we’d spent together. It was definitely in the past; Cynthia had made that clear. She didn’t even want the case anymore, and probably would have made me drop her for another attorney if her apartment hadn’t been torched.

  “In any case, you say she’s getting to the bottom of this?” I nodded in response to Dad’s question.

  “Seems to be getting a lot of intel,” I said, drinking down about a quarter of my cup of coffee.

  “There’s some stuff I hope she doesn’t see,” Dad observed. I looked at him for a minute.

  “There’s plenty of stuff I hope she doesn’t see,” I agreed. “Just from what I know of what you’ve done, there’s stuff that could possibly land you--and me, come to think of it--in jail.”

  Dad chuckled. “I checked everything with the legal department first, at least the official stuff,” he said. I rolled my eyes.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” I set my cup down. “I know what kind of unofficial stuff you’re up to. That shit could be behind this, and you know it.”

  “I told her everything that could have been relevant that I thought of at the time,” Daid said, sounding defensive. “But I’ve had some more thoughts since then, and I want you to look into it, not her.” I stared at Dad again for a few moments.

  “What the hell have you been up to?” I had played fast and loose with the rules my whole career. As Dad said, it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. But I had no illusions about the fact that Dad and I didn’t exactly travel in the most ethical circles.

  “There’s a guy that might be involved,” Dad said. “He and I talked about making a deal, but nothing ever came of it. It was going to be involved
in a campaign in South America, a bigwig there. A guy-wants-a-job thing.” I nodded. I’d been in on more than one of those particular kinds of deals before.

  The way they generally worked was that someone with some kind of claim to being electable in another country, one that had some resource, some product that somebody in the US wanted, would make themselves known to a friend of mine, or Dad’s. That person would come to me, or to Dad, and present the proposal. It wasn’t strictly legal, it wasn’t strictly illegal; it was just one of those things you could do with money and was ultimately an investment in the long run. We’d chip in to help the guy get elected, and he would cut us in for some profits when he got in touch with the people in question who wanted access to a resource, or a product, or something else.

  “So why didn’t this one go through?” Dad shrugged.

  “It was going to be a bad investment,” he said. “Guy was unelectable; some kind of scandal that the religious majority wouldn’t be likely to look past. So I passed.” That would make sense, and I thought about the way that could impact the situation we were in.

  “Who was going to go in with you on it?” Dad took out one of his notepads; he always kept one in a pocket to write things down. He scribbled a couple of names down.

  “These two guys were part of the deal on this end,” he said. “I met them through Dana. Remember her?” Dana had been one of Dad’s girlfriends about a year before.

  “We should probably check out Dana, then,” I said. Dad shrugged.

  “Might be worth it,” he agreed. I looked at the names and realized they were ones I vaguely recognized. They were associates of Dad’s, guys who’d been in the business for a while, with the same kind of ethical flexibility. I wasn’t sure if they were involved, but I figured there was probably a good reason to find out if they knew who might be. And I was pretty sure that if they weren’t involved in framing Dad and attacking me, they were likely to know someone who knew someone, at least. Someone who would have the answers. There were no real secrets in the finance world, after all.