Private Justice

by Marie Ferrarella

  Was Hank having a breakdown of sorts, confronted with a situation he had no control over? Dylan wondered as he drove over. Or was there something else at work here? Something that hadn’t come to light yet? Was there a reason why Hank Kelley was behaving so erratically?

  He needed to look into his father’s eyes as they spoke to get a better feel for what was going on. It was obvious he hadn’t entirely leveled with his son earlier.

  No surprise there, Dylan thought cryptically.

  This time, they didn’t bother taking a roundabout route. In the interest of brevity, they entered through the front gates, passing the wall of reporters, all clamoring for a statement of some sort, a sound bite to run with.

  Dylan never slowed his vehicle down, never looked at a single face. Instead, he stonily kept his face forward, his gaze on his target, focused on the estate proper as he drove toward it.

  Distant flashes of light accompanied their disembarkation from the vehicle as the tabloid contingent with their incredibly long-range lenses took photograph after photograph to commemorate and freeze their arrival—until the next big scandal came along.

  Taking Cindy’s arm, Dylan acted as a human buffer, placing himself between his father’s assistant and the cameras. He felt her instantly stiffen; he pretended not to notice.

  “Don’t look at them,” he ordered.

  He sounded so deadly serious, she had to laugh. Or maybe that was just tension arising from the hold he had on her arm. She had to remind herself he wasn’t Dean.

  And she was never going to give him the opportunity to become Dean.

  “Or what?” she asked. “I’ll turn into a pillar of salt?”

  “No, but you’ll have your face splashed across God knows how many tabloid rags and most likely the evening cable news as well, heralding you as yet another one of my father’s mistresses, brazenly come to comfort him in his time of need.”

  Her eyes widened as she stared at him incredulously. He hustled her to the front door. “But I’m not,” Cindy protested.

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll still call you that. Didn’t you know? When it comes to scandals, you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

  “So then why didn’t we use the tunnel again?” she asked.

  Yeah, maybe he should have after all. But it was too late for that now.

  “Because I wanted to give them a show of family solidarity,” he told her. “I thought it might do the old man some good, seeing that on the evening news. I’m beginning to regret it,” he admitted. He didn’t bother with the obvious answer, that this route was also, ultimately, faster than finding their way underground.

  She glossed over the last part, taking, what to her was the only thing that really meant something here. “So you do care about him,” she concluded with a touch of triumph.

  Dylan honestly didn’t know if he was capable of having feelings for his father. It had been a very long time since he’d felt anything when it came to the old man, but one thing he did know. “I don’t like seeing the media torture anyone unless it happens to be a proven first-degree murderer.”

  She paused to smile at him as he rang the doorbell. “There goes my theory about all lawyers being cold-blooded reptiles.”

  “Don’t throw it out just yet,” he advised wryly. “You might want to dust it off again soon enough.”

  Her eyebrows came together over her near-perfect nose. “Why?”

  He had no time to answer, the front door was opening. Martha stood on the other side, looking very concerned. Gone was the friendly smile, replaced by one continuous frown line.

  “He’s still upstairs, packing,” she told Dylan. “I’m glad you came so quickly. It would be a shame if he did something rash. Those vultures out there,” she nodded toward the winding road and the gates beyond it, “want nothing more than to rip him to shreds.”

  “I think the time for worrying about his doing something rash is past, Martha. All we can do is try to keep him from making it worse,” Dylan told her.

  He walked into the foyer, its brighter-than-bright chandelier bathing the entire area in what seemed like warm sunlight. Dylan went directly to the dual staircase, taking the side closest to him. At the foot, he paused to look at Cindy.

  “You can stay down here if you want to,” he told her.

  She read between the lines. He didn’t want her tiring herself out or exerting herself. He was being protective. Why? What was his angle? Dean had taught her that no man was nice just for the sake of being nice. There was always a motive, an ultimate plan.

  “Exercise is supposed to be good for me,” she told him.

  Almost against her will, even as she set up barriers of denial about her condition, she’d glanced through the reading material her gynecologist had placed in her hands the day she’d confirmed her pregnancy.

  “You’ll want to take care of yourself and your baby,” Dr. Sutherland had told her. The woman’s words still rang in Cindy’s ears, cropping up every day or so, driving her crazy. She didn’t want this baby. What did she know about raising a baby? Her own mother was dead by the time she was four and her father had put her into the foster system, saying he just wasn’t up to taking care of a little girl. She had no role models, no base to start from. This unborn child was a disaster waiting to happen.

  She forced herself to focus on the situation before her. “Just lead the way,” she told Dylan, waving him up first.

  The suite that served as his father’s bedroom—connected to his mother’s bedroom by two oversize walk-in closets placed back to back—was in the center of the second floor. The door was standing open, but Dylan knocked on it anyway just before entering.

  His father had his back to the entrance, absorbed by the frustrating activity of trying to fit an enormous amount of clothing into a regular-size suitcase.

  “I take it you don’t pack your own suitcases very often,” Dylan commented.

  His father swung around, all the blood suddenly draining from his face. His complexion had turned to a ghostly shade of chalk in the course of one heartbeat. His hand now splayed across his chest, he glared at his son.

  “Dylan, you scared the hell out of me,” he cried.

  “Apparently.” Why was the man so spooked? “For the record, I knocked. And I have a witness.” He nodded at Cindy. “Where’re you going, Dad?”

  The senator ran his hand through his silver mane. “Away.”

  “Anything more specific than that?” The blank look on his father’s face answered the question for him. “Just what I thought,” Dylan said with a sigh. He had his work cut out for him. His father was coming apart.

  Chapter 9

  It took patience and time, but Dylan finally managed to persuade his father to remain at the estate until he could make arrangements for the man to stay somewhere safe and far off the grid. The deciding factor had been a promise to find him a bodyguard, one who necessarily came from outside the system and had no ties to any of the people who lived within the world of politics and power that the senator, until a few days ago, had inhabited.

  One of the two men he’d been thinking of bringing in, Bart Holden, had already been contacted and had agreed to take the job. The one he really wanted, though, was an ex-special ops agent named Gage Prescott. However, he had yet to be contacted and brought in. He knew Gage by reputation, knew that the man was fearless and capable of putting his life on the line in order to protect whomever he had sworn to protect. Right now, Dylan had a gut feeling that was exactly the kind of man his father needed guarding him.

  Off the top of his head, Dylan didn’t know how long finding Gage would take, given that he had no idea where the man currently might be.

  In the interim, Dylan told his pacing father that he would call in a favor from a local private investigator he knew and trusted to stay at the estate until he got other things into place.

  “What things?” Hank had asked nervously.

  “It’s better that you not know that
until everything’s set,” Dylan had replied.

  That his father had readily agreed with him showed Dylan just how far the man had fallen. The old Senator Kelley would have never allowed control of his own fate to be taken away like that.

  It also told Dylan that his instincts were right. There was something else wrong, something else going on that his father hadn’t disclosed, and that he remained, as of yet, entirely unwilling to acknowledge or talk about.

  “He said the reporters were responsible for making him so jumpy,” Dylan told Cindy as, once again, he drove her back to his father’s office. This time he only intended to drop Cindy off in the underground parking facility so that she could retrieve her car and go home.

  Listening to Dylan, she picked up on his skeptical tone. “You don’t buy it,” she guessed.

  Rather than answer directly, he glanced at her as he asked, “Do you?”

  The question didn’t require any thought on her part. “No,” she admitted.

  The senator’s present behavior was completely out of character for the man she had come to know and regard as a surrogate father.

  Dylan was glad he wasn’t the only one who felt that there was something else going on. “I’ve seen him with reporters. My father charms them, uses them. And he is pretty much in contempt of them. They don’t have this kind of effect on him. They don’t make him jumpy. There’s something else going on here, something he doesn’t want to talk about.”

  Cindy nodded. “I know. I’m beginning to feel the same way.” She sighed. “So, if he won’t tell you, what are you going to do?”

  “Well, I can’t exactly tie him to a chair and use a rubber hose on the man to get him to talk.” He banked down his growing frustration. “I suppose I just have to wait and try to get him to trust me enough to confide in me. Unless—”

  The last word just hung in the air. “Unless what?” Cindy prodded.

  It was suddenly so simple. Dylan slanted a glance at her. “My father trusts you. Maybe if you try to get him to tell you what it is that has him so nervous that every single noise has him jumping and looking over his shoulder…”

  They were stopped at a red light. Dylan’s voice had trailed off and she assumed it was because he was waiting for her to tell him that she’d do what he’d just suggested. But when she looked at him, she saw that he was regarding her with an expression that told her he was thinking of something else.

  Weighing something else.

  She snatched up the unfinished sentence, hoping to distract him from whatever path his thoughts were taking in regards to her. “Well, I don’t know if it’ll work, but I can certainly try to get the senator to open up.”

  The light turned green. Dylan took his foot off the brake and looked back at the road. “How about you?”

  For reasons she wasn’t completely clear about, her pulse accelerated faster than the car did. “How about me what?”

  “What can I do or say to make you open up?”

  Where had that come from? And, more importantly, where was he going with this?

  “This isn’t about me,” Cindy pointed out tersely. She didn’t want him invading her private life, probing and prodding it as if it was something he had the right to dissect. Because he didn’t. No one did.

  Dylan guided the car into the underground parking facility. “No, but in your own way you’re as tense as he is. You’re jumpy,” he added, using the same word he’d used to describe his father’s jittery nerves. “Why?”

  She tossed her hair back, looking straight ahead. “You’re imagining things.”

  “No, I’m not.” And they both knew it. “Every time I touch any part of you, an arm, a shoulder, if I just accidentally brush by you, you either tense up as stiff as a baton or you flinch. Unless you’re allergic to me, or have the world’s most delicate skin, there’s only one reason for you to react that way.”

  “That’s my car, over there,” she pointed out, hoping to terminate this third degree he was subjecting her to. She should have known better.

  Instead of driving toward her parked vehicle, Dylan pulled his own over to the side. Bringing it to a dead stop, he hit the door locks, forcing her to remain inside. He looked at her and saw panic flash in her eyes. It proved his theory and made him feel guilty for putting her through this. But ultimately, he wasn’t the one who had created the basis for her fears.

  He had his suspicions who had, but he didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. “Who hurt you, Cindy?” he asked softly.

  She set her mouth hard, refusing to look at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He didn’t have any patience to play games, but for her sake, he dug deep for whatever patience he did have.

  “You’re too intelligent to act dumb,” he told her. “Women who automatically flinch when someone raises a hand or touches them are victims of abuse. Who was it?” She didn’t answer but Dylan refused to drop the subject. This was bigger than any need to remain polite. “Was it the baby’s father?”

  Her head jerked up. Rather than fear, or a deer-in-the-headlights look, he saw indignant anger. Good, it meant that whoever had done this to her hadn’t completely crushed her spirit.

  “He’s not a father,” Cindy cried heatedly. Her eyes filled with tears even as she berated herself for being so weak as to allow her emotions to get the better of her. But when she became passionate about something, her control over tears waned. This despite the fact that the complete wasted mass of skin and blood vessels that was her ex wasn’t worth her tears. “He’s a monster.” She whispered the word, afraid that if she said it any louder, her voice would crack and then she really would cry.

  He was right, although he felt no satisfaction in the fact. Her ex-husband had abused her. “Does he know he’s going to be a father?” He was guessing the answer to that was no, but he wanted to hear her verification.

  Cindy took a breath, then shook her head. “I want no contact with the man. I took out a restraining order against him before I ever filed for divorce. Your father helped me get it,” she told him. “The senator made a few calls and got it fast-tracked. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

  Dylan was beginning to understand the nature of the relationship between his father and this woman. The old man had taken an interest in his assistant the way he should have done with his own family years ago. Maybe this was his way of atoning.

  “Besides,” she added, her voice still low, but slowly shedding the pain that enshrouded it, “Dean—my ex—always hated kids. The thought of having one of his own would have made him want to skip town and leave the country. There’s no way he’d pay child support. Nor would I want him to. Trust me, the man is not daddy material.”

  That wasn’t surprising. “Most men aren’t, at least not to start with.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’re actually defending him?”

  Defending an abuser was the last thing he’d do. To him, anyone who abused a woman or a child was the lowest life form possible. “No, I’m not defending him. I’m just stating a relatively obvious fact. Women are the nurturers. Men are the hunters and gatherers, the providers.”

  That got under her skin, rousing her anger and she was secretly grateful for it. “Do you come with your own loincloth and club or will one be provided for you at your local cave?” she wanted to know.

  Good, she’d bounced back from that momentary lapse. He’d seen the tears and had felt guilty about them. Now he could leave her for the night without feeling as if he was walking away from someone who was exceedingly vulnerable. He wouldn’t have felt right about doing that.

  “I haven’t checked my membership literature about that yet. I’ll let you know when I find out,” he promised, doing his best not to grin. His success was only marginal.

  Rather than hitting the lock release, he started up his car again and drove her over to her car.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she told him. “I could have w
alked.”

  “I know,” he replied. “I wanted to do this. It’s dark and there aren’t that many cars left here. It’s not safe for a pretty woman to be walking around here alone.”

  He was being nice. God, she wished she could let her guard down enough to just enjoy that. But she couldn’t. Everything was suspect to her now. Every nice gesture extended by a man could be a potential smoke screen to lull her into a feeling of complacency—and then he’d turn the tables on her.

  When they’d met, Dean had seemed like the embodiment of an earthbound guardian angel. He’d turned out to be the devil in disguise once they were married.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” she asked Dylan.

  He knew she was asking about his father. Dylan didn’t try to snow her. He had a feeling she’d see right through it and wouldn’t appreciate the gesture. She was more likely to be insulted by it.

  “That all depends on what he’s really done. And whose persona non grata list he’s on. Finding out is going to take a lot of digging.” Especially since his father wasn’t offering any clues.

  Nodding, Cindy told him, “You’re going to need help with that digging.”

  Dylan was well aware of that. In the time they’d spent in his father’s office today, they hadn’t begun to scrape the surface. “You volunteering?”

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth. Was she making a mistake, agreeing to work beside this man? But if she didn’t, who would help him? The rest of the staff had made themselves scarce, waiting for this to play itself out.

  “I’m volunteering.”

  For a moment, he thought of just going upstairs to his father’s office and picking up where they’d left off. Doubling back to the estate and attempting to calm the man down had bitten a large chunk out of their time. But it was getting late and he still had at least a couple of phone calls to make on his father’s behalf. He needed to set things in motion.