Sure…and she had a normal sex life and a regular boyfriend.
“Anna.” His voice dropped, his expression serious. “Davis was a good man who showed me I could also be a good man. He gave me back hope.” He hooked her hair behind her ear, his fingers just brushing her skin. He loomed over her, but she didn’t feel like he was going to attack her. It felt more like he’d die to keep her safe.
A spark of want shot through her. Her breath hitched and she swallowed hard. Dammit, she didn’t want this physical attraction on top of the mess her life had become. Men like Brent Carver were off-limits to a woman as careful as she was.
“What did the PI have to say?” Her voice was breathy, but the words had the desired effect and he backed away as if suddenly aware he stood too close and might intimidate her, given his less-than-Boy-Scout history. And although she was hyperaware of him, it wasn’t because he’d killed someone. It was because of something else she hadn’t felt since she was a carefree teen. Something she thought had died the night of her high school prom.
He grabbed himself a coffee. “Want one?”
“Yes.” And like that they moved on. “Please.” As if the heat and connection and pure weight of emotional baggage between them evaporated. It left her confused and off-balance and grateful.
He poured her a cup and went over to his laptop and opened it up. Clicked on his e-mail provider and then opened an audio file.
They listened to the 911 tape.
“I work for the Holladay Foundation. Someone’s been stealing from the company so I took it back before it disappeared forever. I want to come in. I need police protection.” The words echoed around Anna’s brain. Why hadn’t the police protected him? Why hadn’t someone saved him?
“I should phone the police and find out what they’re doing to investigate his death,” she said.
Brent sipped his coffee, sprawled in the chair in a corner of the kitchen where he kept his computer. “My PI spoke to the cops. They’re treating it as an accidental death. Said security from his firm chased him when they found out he was stealing, and Davis jumped under the train rather than get caught.”
“Don’t you think that’s possible?” All the energy sagged out of Anna and she sat on a bar stool looking down on Brent. “That he panicked and ran and then made up all this stuff about someone being crooked?” Because her father would rather die than go back to prison.
He looked at her from beneath dark brows. “Doesn’t explain why security people from the foundation have been staking out your dad’s place waiting for the mailman.”
Her eyes widened. “Except if it is their money, they’ve every right to want it back.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Crap, she’d been so stupid. “I need to go home.”
He held his hands wide. “Why? What the hell changed? That phone call just told you Davis thought his bosses were stealing from the charity he worked for. He said he thought someone was going to kill him.”
“He was lying, Brent,” she said bitterly. “The same way he lied when the cops knocked on our front door all those years ago and hauled him and Mom off for police questioning. The same way he lied in court.” She locked her jaw. Shame tasted bitter on her tongue.
Brent climbed to his feet. “I can’t believe you don’t believe in your own father—”
“Said the man who killed his?” Anna was incredulous. “Don’t judge me.” She shoved against his chest to gain a little space, but it was like pushing a house. He didn’t move.
Panic bit and she shoved harder. “The evidence was all there, he set up those offshore bank accounts—”
“Anyone could have framed him.”
Disbelieving, she stared at him. “His codes were used to make the transactions. He didn’t have a single alibi for the times when the money was moved—”
“He was a scapegoat, a patsy—”
“And if you believe that you’re the biggest fool in this room!”
“Oh, I’m definitely a fool.” He scowled. “Having done time, Davis made an even better patsy second time around, except he caught on. Stopped them in their tracks.”
“Oh, please. No one is that unlucky.”
“Seriously?” He looked at her like she’d started speaking dog. “What planet are you from?”
Fury lit a flame under her skin. She crossed her arms and glared at him.
“So why aren’t the police investigating his death? Why the desire to sweep it all under the carpet in a neat tidy package?” he asked.
“You think there’s a conspiracy?” God, he was unbelievable.
“I’m guessing there’s a lot of cash involved.”
“I need to contact them,” she insisted, picking up the phone.
His hands covered hers, his whole body shaking. “And what if they’re dirty? How do you know who to trust?”
A terrible thought struck her. “How do I know you aren’t deceiving me and keeping me here for reasons of your own?”
Brent reared back as if she’d slapped him. His eyes flashed with pain and his expression shut down.
Oh crap. Anna put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean that.” But he backed away from her as if she were contagious.
He started to walk away, but she didn’t want him to go. Not like this. She grabbed his arm but he jerked free.
“Brent, I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did. But you’re wrong about me and you were wrong about your father.” His eyes were glacial, and a frisson of fear snaked down her spine. “Your father didn’t steal that money nine years ago, and I’d bet my ass he didn’t steal it this time—or if he did,” he interrupted when she was about to argue, “he did it to stop being set up again. And if you’d ever got your head out of your adolescent ass long enough to think about anyone else but yourself, you might have figured it out years ago.”
The jab slid home like a blade. Then he was gone, and she was left alone in the starkly beautiful house with only the seductive sound of the sea for company.
Jack Panetti pulled out a cheeseburger and fries and bit into dinner. Most of his cases were getting photographs of spouses cheating, or workers reshingling their roofs while claiming disability. This was different. Brent Carver had asked him to check into the company Davis Silver—deceased—had worked for. On the surface the company seemed legit. Hank Browning was a former four-star general who’d cleaned house down in Colombia. Now he ran a foundation to raise money for injured veterans. A good and worthy cause.
But there was something fishy about their operation.
For one, the numbers didn’t add up. Of course, there were overheads, rent, staff to pay, and anonymous donations that made it hard to track, but from what his computer guru told him the numbers seemed off. Then there was a warehouse they rented for no obvious reason. Then the people Browning employed for “security.” Ex-soldiers. Mercenaries.
Why wouldn’t a charity helping injured soldiers have ex-military on staff?
But something was tugging his tail, and rather than stretching out in his massive bed at the luxury hotel he was booked into and ordering room service on Brent Carver’s tab, he was eating junk food while staking out Browning’s head of security in the burbs.
Nice house. Nice neighborhood. No red flags. But his instincts were screaming.
Juice dripped down his chin as he took another bite of his burger. A car drove up the guy’s driveway and two men got out and hurried inside. Jack wiped his chin, got out his binos, and wrote down the plate number.
A dog began barking, so he started his engine. Time to head out before someone called the cops about the strange man parked on their street. He tossed down his burger wrappings and froze when someone opened the rear door, got into the car, and tapped a pistol against his skull.
“Let’s take a drive.”
“Who the hell are you? Get out of my car!” Jack went with innocent indignation but knew he was screwed.
“Move it unless you want to become another Chicago statistic.”
Jack curled his lip in self-disgust. He tried to see the guy in the mirror. Nothing but a dark shadow.
“Take the expressway.” The guy sounded older, definitely not a kid or a routine carjacker. He’d been made by the people he was following and he hadn’t been made since his early undercover days with the boys in blue. These guys were professional soldiers with something to hide.
Jack put on his blinkers as sweat trickled down his back. He sped up, hoping to attract the attention of a cop.
“Slow down, speedy.” The metal of the gun grazed his ear.
And then all his prayers were answered as he saw a patrol car in the rearview mirror.
“Don’t do anything stupid and you might get out of this alive.” The voice was flat and devoid of emotion.
Suddenly Jack knew this man was going to kill him. How the hell had an investigation into one man’s supposed accidental death turned into a life-and-death situation?
The cop car drew level and the guy lowered the pistol and leaned against the backseat. Jack gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles hurt. Tension grew to a snapping point. The cop pulled past. Just as the guy in the backseat started to relax, Jack jerked the steering wheel hard left and hit the cop car side on.
Jack saw the cop’s look of incredulity a moment before he turned on his turret lights.
“You stupid fucking asshole.” The guy in the back barely raised his voice. “Drive.”
But Jack was jamming on the brakes, undoing his seat belt, and bailing out the door. He rolled, heard a series of squealing brakes and the crash of metal as he crawled like a maniac to the side of the freeway. Streetlights illuminated the scene as he lay panting. Old bullet wounds ached. He mentally weighed his cuts and bruises to reassure himself nothing was broken. Then he turned to see what was going on.
His rental car had come to an ugly stop at the side of the road. The cop had pulled up at an angle in front of it, lights dancing across the tarmac. Jack lay on the ground, hands on his head, offering no threat to law enforcement. He wanted this bastard in custody.
The cop got out, shot him a look, then approached the vehicle with his gun drawn. The next moment, he was jerking on his feet, pounded by impact as the guy in the car shot repeatedly through the steel door.
“Holy mother.” The cop fell to his knees, blood spraying the concrete behind him. Horrified, Jack realized he’d just gotten the man killed.
His stomach clenched. Sirens wailed in the background. Cars pulled over all around him in a monster jam. The door to his rental opened slowly, and he saw the guy’s face for just a second before Jack got his shit together enough to stand up and start running. The bullet hit Jack in the back, a single flash of excruciating pain before he slammed face-first into the blacktop.
Brent paced his studio. Anger threaded through his veins. For all the things he’d done. For everything he couldn’t undo. For being stupid enough to let her words hurt. He picked up his palette and daubed some black into the center of it, then slammed the palette down, paint splattering across the floor. His teeth clenched so hard he thought his jaw would break. Fuck. He whirled and put his fist through an unfinished canvas that had shown a serene lake scene, but was now as damaged as the rest of him.
He let out a tight breath and rolled his shoulders. Flexed his fingers. Tried to rein it in. How could someone who’d been so sweet as a teenager turn into such a bitch? Hell, she was as dark and cynical as most cons.
At least inside, people knew better than to ask about your crime. Do your own time and keep your nose out of it. His heart pounded even thinking about being inside. Prison was a nightmare—being locked up. His ribs squeezed tight against his lungs. He never wanted to go back, but at least he knew the rules for being inside.
Outside—anything could happen. He’d learned to expect the unexpected, but accusations, like the one Miss Prim and Proper had thrown at him, hurt. Fuck.
He concentrated on his work. Added black to the pine forest on one side of the canvas. And stood back to survey the effect. Christ. He stepped forward and scraped off as much as he could and slammed the palette once again onto his worktable. He had to finish this piece for the exhibition, but since Anna had arrived, he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think about his work. And usually it was all he thought about.
Immersing himself in his art had been his only escape from the confines of prison, and nowadays painting was an anchor in a world he didn’t even pretend to understand.
He was fine in this house, on this beach. He didn’t want to go anywhere else. Didn’t need anything or anyone else.
The sound of the back door opening and closing had him jerking his head to see out the window. He tensed as he watched Anna walk down to the end of the dock and sit with her toes dangling in the water.
There was no breeze tonight. The sea was flat calm, like some lazy seductress extending a languid hand in an invitation to play. The last rays of the sun slowly disappeared, and he looked off at the boiling horizon and narrowed his gaze at the streaks of purple and blue that gathered like bruises on young flesh. The calmness was deceptive. The lack of energy was a lure for the unwary. A storm was coming. A big one. He looked back at Anna—the expression on her face was unguarded, desolate, and played the fiddle on his heartstrings.
She pissed him off but…hell, he was attracted to her. Admitting that made his mouth go dry. He liked how she moved, how she ate, how she didn’t flinch away from him even though she was obviously nervous. He wanted to dig deeper, to uncover the core of who Anna Silver really was.
But she was also the daughter of his best friend, a man who’d entrusted her to his care. She was a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher and he was older and rougher than sin. Even if she had been interested in him, he couldn’t pursue it. He respected the memory of his friend too much to sully his daughter. Hell, he barely slept at night, let alone functioned in the normal world. The last woman he’d been involved with had ended up on a slab in the morgue.
He watched Anna watching his ocean. Watched her as she slowly absorbed the rhythm of the waves against the shore. All the anger and resentment fell away from him. Peace fell over her features and he knew, with gut-wrenching certainty, that he’d do anything to keep it there.
CHAPTER 6
“Good morning, how can I help you?” Warden Rick Pennington picked up his telephone on the second ring.
Rand was calling from Anna’s mom’s place where he and Marco had holed up overnight. “I’m afraid I have some bad news I wanted to pass on to you on behalf of Davis Silver’s family. He was an inmate with you from—”
“I remember Davis,” the man interrupted. “What’s happened?”
Rand put on his deepest voice. “Terrible accident in Chicago. Davis was tragically hit by a train and died instantly.” Marco sniggered and Rand shot him a look. Shut the fuck up. “His daughter, Anna, is organizing a memorial service on the island after the funeral, but didn’t know if he had any friends from his time in prison who might like to attend.”
“Only Brent.” Brent—Rand wrote it down and Marco did an Internet search on it and Wilkinson Prison. “That’s too bad about Davis. He was one of our success stories.” The warden cleared his throat. “How about you tell me the details and I’ll pass them on to the people who were close to him in prison?”
Rand fed him a line of bullshit and hung up.
Ding. They got a hit. Brent Carver. Lifer. Served twenty. He’d grown up in a tiny community on the west coast—Bamfield—and had been out of prison for the last four years.
“Let’s get some wheels, Marco, and track this bastard down.” Maybe this was the guy Davis had sent Anna to. All he knew was he was done sitting around with his thumb up his ass waiting for something to happen. “We’re gonna need some equipment.”
The boys in Chicago were busy running damage control after one of them killed a cop and shot some PI who was nosing around too close for comfort. Rand would handle getting the gear they needed himself. He ha
d his own contacts. They were elite soldiers used to operating in hostile environments under pressure, not undertrained, underequipped cops.
Rand had no intention of doing time for his crimes—goddamn, he’d gotten medals for some of them in the past. If Anna was with this Brent character, he’d set it up so the guy went down for Anna Silver’s murder. It seemed like poetic justice, and after all the shit Davis had put him through, he was looking forward to a little payback.
The distant sound of a phone ringing had Anna blinking away the grit in her eyes as she lay in bed. She fought to surface through the fog of exhaustion and tried to figure out where she was.
Then she remembered—the edge of nowhere with the last man on earth she should trust.
She squinted at her wristwatch on the dresser: 9:00 a.m. Wow. She’d been awake for most of the night and had finally drifted off when the sun started to lighten the eastern edge of the horizon. The phone carried on ringing. She staggered out of bed and onto the landing. Brent’s bedroom door was closed. She hadn’t seen him since she’d accused him of keeping her here for his own reasons and he’d told her to grow up. He was right. It wasn’t like he’d keep her around because she was such great company or anything. And he didn’t seem to want to hurt her despite her being a royal pain in his butt ever since she’d arrived.
Sheesh. Talk about being paranoid. She ran to the kitchen, but just as she was about to pick up the receiver it stopped ringing. Rats.
“I need coffee,” she told the empty space. Exhausted, she fixed a pot, and was just filling a cup when Brent came down the stairs, freshly showered, wearing a shirt—albeit unbuttoned—and a pair of clean, well-worn jeans.
Although he might be wearing more clothes than usual, there were still plenty of hills and valleys visible beneath that open shirt, and every one of them looked like an adventure.
She averted her eyes, wishing she were someone else. Someone with the courage to enjoy looking at a fine physical specimen of a man without blushing. Although, crap, couldn’t he be just a little out of shape? He made her aware of all the soft places on her body that no gym was ever going to fix.
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