by CC MacKenzie
"Dad," Adam said as he scrolled through his cell. "Did Andy call home?"
"You mean like, E.T?" Liam cackled, cracking himself up.
Liam was getting on her nerves.
And why wasn't he taking her situation seriously?
"Nope," her father said, a man of few words.
But one thing was bothering Elena now.
She was in the middle of a crisis.
A crisis of epic proportions.
So why weren't the men in her family treating her mental breakdown with the respect it deserved?
Adam was ignoring the way her foot was jabbing him in the ribs and instead listening with rapt attention to a message on his cell.
He tossed the phone on the table, grabbed a pizza box, opened the lid and offered Elena first dibs. His way of saying, 'Don't worry, darling.'
She chose a slice of pepperoni and then thanked Liam for plucking the mug of hot chocolate out of her hand and replacing it with a glass of wine. His response to her mumble of thanks was to rub his knuckles on her skull, which meant her brother loved her more than life.
She took a healthy gulp of wine, chewed on her pie and stared miserably into the fire.
How could a woman be on top of the world one minute and then dropped into the fires of hell the next minute?
Where on earth had it all gone wrong?
Elena sniffed as a single tear pooled and tipped over.
And she didn't notice three grown men staring at her with an Aww, look in their eyes.
Czar was one of those rare animals, a dog who didn't beg for food at the table. From his prone position in front of the fire, his ears twitched and then his head rose before he got to his feet and did his doggie trot, tail held high, as he moved out the room and down the corridor to the door.
His single woof coincided with the sound of a car door closing.
Probably her brother Joe. He was a doctor. A man who was good in a family emergency. And a man who could dispense drugs. Elena knew she could do with something to knock her out cold. Oblivion sounded like a great place to visit for a while.
The doorbell rang.
And in the way of families where everyone and their friends came and went without knocking or ringing the bell, they all went utterly still.
Daniel looked at Elena.
Elena looked at Adam.
Adam looked at Liam.
Nobody moved.
After an exaggerated eye roll, Liam put down his beer, his slice of pizza, and got up to answer the door.
The sound of male voices made Elena's ears prick.
Maybe it was the police?
But then she heard a voice she knew well tell Czar he was big beautiful beast.
Shitty shit shit.
Elena placed her wine, her pizza on the table and dived under the blankets with a panicked,
"Tell him I'm not here."
So she missed the way her father's brow flew into his hairline and the way Adam grinned like a Cheshire cat.
"Sure, come on in," Liam said, to the person Elena did not want to see, as he entered the sitting room with the unwelcome guest. "She's right here on the sofa. What the hell are you doing under there, Elena? You've gotta visitor."
Under the blanket Elena's heart was acting crazy in her chest, drumming a beat like Virgil Donati on crack, in other words, too fast.
Silence.
"Elena?" Marc said.
"FUCK OFF!" she yelled.
Cue another long and collectively stunned silence.
Still under the blanket, Elena made a face and squeezed her eyes shut, because she'd never, ever, in her whole life, EVER cursed in the house of her father.
"You're going to get a spanking for that," Marc said.
Chapter Sixteen
"Right, son," Daniel Kennedy, said into the second stunned silence in as many minutes. "We'll leave you two to it."
"Thank you, sir," growled Marc.
Sir?
Creep.
Sucking up to her father like that.
Hiding under a blanket like this was quite a ridiculous situation to be in, Elena realised, and wondered if she was seriously losing her tiny mind.
She might be behaving like it, but she wasn't five years old.
She was an adult.
But before she could do anything, the cover was pulled back to reveal an angry Marc Atelier glaring down at her. Very angry.
Elena could tell by the way his blue eyes drilled into hers, by the way his hair was a mess, as if he'd been running his hands through it. And by the way his strong jaw was clenched too tight. He was dressed in jeans tucked into black boots, a gorgeous black sweater and a grey puffa jacket.
He looked... gorgeous.
But Elena turned her head to stare into the fire, she didn't want him here, or in her life.
She wanted him gone.
"Get out," she said.
The response was a low throaty growl before she was hauled to her feet and shaken until her teeth rattled.
"What the hell is the matter with you?" he roared.
She blinked up into his furious face.
And just like that her temper roared like a lion.
"Excuse me? Who was the one who just stood there while I was grilled for hours?HOURS!" she yelled right back at him. "Not once did you defend me. How could you just stand there like that? You simply tossed me to the wolves and stepped back."
He released her so fast she stumbled.
Then he paced to the fire and back.
Now he stood in front of her, in her personal space, hands on hips and jutted his chin.
"I'm not talking about all that crap. I'm talking about you telling Nico that you've finished with me. Are you fucking crazy?"
Crap?
What had happened to her today wasn't crap. It was so far removed from crap that...
Wait a minute.
Mind spinning, Elena sank to the couch, took a gulp of wine.
She didn't offer him a drink because as far as she was concerned he'd arrived uninvited and wasn't welcome.
"Explain the crap comment to me."
Marc heaved a deeply frustrated sigh of a male at the end of his tether.
Without asking he took a bottle beer from the pack, unscrewed the top and drank deeply.
"If you had just waited in Nico's office for a few more minutes, you would have realised that you were in the clear."
The room spun and Marc's face seemed to zoom out and then zoom back into focus.
In the clear?
"But... you never said a single word. You just stood there while they grilled me. At any moment I was expecting water boarding or electric cattle prods."
"Now you're being ridiculous," he said.
Obviously not fearing for his life he used a tone that pressed a hot button, a red haze misted before her eyes.
"It was the worst afternoon of my entire life," she yelled at the top of her voice.
Unlike Tom, Marc remained unfazed by an angry woman.
He shook his head.
Now his eyes stayed on hers.
"You handled them like a pro. I was so terribly proud of you. You stood your ground. Baby, you were amazing."
Elena blinked frantically as the red haze evaporated.
Her emotions felt as if they were on an elastic band being bounced all over the place.
Then those magic words he'd uttered earlier flew into her confused brain.
"I'm in the clear?"
"Yes. It was Jenny."
Elena couldn't tear her eyes from his and saw the truth.
"Jenny? My Jenny? Lovely little Jenny who's been doing a wonderful job? I just can't believe it."
Now Marc came to sit next to her and threw his arm around her shoulder.
"Yeah, well. It's a long story. Let's get your dad and brothers in here so I only have to tell it once."
"Okay."
Elena couldn't say that she felt that all was right with her world now she was in the clear, because it w
asn't, but she did feel as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
She turned to look up into Marc's face, saw him studying hers carefully.
"Oh baby, you've been crying for nothing. Once we'd finished with Jenny, I rushed to find you. And you'd gone. Nico's frantic. And you left your cell phone behind."
Now her eyes narrowed into his.
"If you remember, I was instructed to hand my cell phone to the police."
"Point taken." He stood. "I'll get your dad and brothers."
He didn't have to go far because they were standing right outside the door.
And every single one looked... pissed.
"Come in," Marc said.
They did and took their positions.
Liam lifted Elena and dropped her between him and Adam on the sofa, and her father sat in his chair.
Marc had faced the Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents and never felt the lick of fear up his spine he was feeling now.
Man, the Kennedy's were big bastards.
All three men had folded their muscled arms.
And all three were giving him the stink eye.
He focused on Elena.
Poor baby.
She'd had a helluva day, but he'd only spoken the truth. She'd been amazing. Not once had she faltered when speaking to Nico or Andy Bradshaw. He knew she'd been shaking inside, and no wonder. But not once had she shown anything except a stiff pride laced with plenty of courage.
A courage that made him proud.
He paced to the fire and back, glanced at the dog who looked as if it was laughing at him.
Yeah, well, there was nothing funny about all this.
Nothing funny at all.
Marc took a breath.
"Right. So... Nico called me in to Ludlow Hall from my base at The Ferranti Hotel and Spa at Lake Como in Italy. It's a handy central hub for Europe."
"You live in Italy?" Elena piped up.
"Well, yeah. I mean, I did. I don't now because I need to be back in England for my mum and my sister. My dad passed away four months ago," Marc said to Elena's father who was watching him closely.
"Sorry for your loss," Daniel growled. "Family is everything."
Marc stared at him.
"Yes. Yes, it is. Anyway. Nico called me and my team in because information was being leaked to a tabloid. Little trickles that on their own might not mean much, but put together were very damaging to Nico and his family..."
"I couldn't believe the things in those emails. I felt sick to my stomach when I read them," Elena said.
"Yeah. Well, not everything was used by the journalist, but she used enough."
"What journalist?" Adam piped up.
"Um. Tabitha Crew. Anyway, we set up an investigation, checking all email traffic and company cell phone traffic from Ludlow Hall. And we narrowed the mole down to housekeeping, reception, and the administration staff. And then we found the majority of the messages embedded in Elena's email account."
"So, was our relationship based on a lie? Did you sleep with me to see if I was the one selling secrets?"
He blinked and stared at her as if she was talking in tongues.
All three men, and the dog, sat up tall and straight as if a red hot poker had been stuck up their ass.
And by the way they were looking at him.
Dear Christ.
He was a dead man.
"No! No! We didn't find your connection until yesterday. But I knew there was no way you'd do such a thing. It was a poor attempt by someone to cover their tracks."
She didn't look convinced.
More importantly neither did her father and two brothers.
All three had their eyes lasered on him.
Bloody hell.
Marc shoved his hands through his hair and battled on.
"Anyway. We found two bugs in Nico's office..."
"Bugs?"
"Recording devices," Adam told Elena then nodded for Marc to continue.
"It's all very James Bond," she spoke her thoughts out loud.
Marc just stared hard at her.
"Riiiight. But we also knew we needed to flush out the mole. We knew it wasn't you, but we'd narrowed it down to the reception team. We looked very closely at family members, partners. And we found that Jenny's boyfriend works for the same tabloid as Tabitha Crew. So we knew we had her," Marc said.
He looked Elena dead in the eye.
"And that's where you came in. Jenny adores you. If she thought you were in deep trouble, we figured she'd break. And sure enough when we got the reception staff all together to tell them that you'd been suspended, Jenny burst into tears. It took a couple of hours to get her statement straight. She wanted her mother. And it all took time."
"You set me up," Elena whispered, her eyes filled with a hurt that caught his lungs.
Marc's throat went dry.
He looked at her brothers, her father, for help.
But none was to be found.
"No. Yes. Well... not really. You would still have been questioned by the police. That's standard procedure. The reason we did it in Nico's office, with a formal caution was..."
"You cautioned my sister?" Liam said in a soft voice.
Marc frowned, cleared his dry throat.
He was in deep doo doo.
When he'd laid the plan out to Nico, the pair of them had admired the straightforward beauty of his concept. After a couple of glasses of bubbly, the idea had seemed so simple and straightforward. In his mind, he had, to be honest, sort of skated over Elena's part in the plan, believing that she'd be tough enough to handle whatever was thrown at her.
Now he could see the fatal flaw in his thinking.
Now he was wondering what the hell he'd been thinking?
He'd hurt her.
Scared her.
He was an idiot.
Desperately, Marc attempted to climb out the deep hole he'd dug for himself.
"As I said, cautioning a witness who is a suspect in a criminal offence, is standard procedure in a case like this. But the main reason we did it was for the benefit of the person listening. We'd left the recording devices where they were. It was imperative that whoever was listening believed that you were genuinely in trouble."
Now Elena stood and Marc could see she was furious.
Her family looked as if they could chew nails.
Shit.
"You set me up. Have you any idea what I went through this afternoon? Have you?"
She was shaking, her hazel eyes all teary.
Fuck.
"I knew you were innocent and Nico wanted action, fast. This way your name is cleared and we have the culprit. Job done."
"Job done?" she repeated.
Marc held up his hands and had a bad feeling things were going from bad to worse.
"You still have your job. As soon as Nico knew you were in the clear he raced back to his office, but you'd gone. He even chased your car down the car park. He's pretty messed up about the whole thing."
Now her brows rose.
And Marc realised that Elena was not listening to him, not really.
"He deserves to be messed up. I told Nico Ferranti that I knew I'd be cleared. I also told him that I'd never set foot in his hotel again. He can stuff his job. I want to work for someone I can trust. I want to have a man standing by my side through thick and thin, through the bad times and the good."
Now Marc frowned because he knew the man she was talking about was him.
"I am standing by you. Why won't you listen to me?"
"You call standing by me setting me up for some sort of sting? Couldn't you have told me why you were at Ludlow Hall in the first place?"
Marc shook his head.
She didn't understand.
No. She didn't want to understand, he realised now.
He got that she'd been through a horrible ordeal.
Of course he did.
But he'd had a job to do.
And he'd done it.
They'd caught the bad guys.
It was time to move on.
He felt sick because he had a question to ask her and he could already see the answer in her eyes.
"What about us?"
Her eyes went colder than ice.
"There is no us."
Chapter Seventeen
Every year, Elena cooked Christmas dinner, with all the trimmings, for her family and a couple of close friends who'd otherwise spend the day alone.
The preparations started on Christmas Eve in an attempt to ensure the day itself went off without a hitch. She didn't see the hard work as a chore. And under normal circumstances, she loved the whole festive vibe. But this year all she wanted to do was curl up in a dark room, throw the comforter over her head and forget about it.
She was standing at the kitchen sink scrubbing a mountain of potatoes, the mindless task was actually therapeutic. Her dad was sitting at the kitchen table peeling carrots, while four of her six brothers were helping by drinking beer and goofing around. The two brothers missing were overseas, training foreign fighters to defend their land.
Last night she'd slept like a log.
Which had come as a pleasant surprise, since her body was aching for Marc. Who knew heartache actually ached? It hurt. She could even press the spot between her ribs where it hurt. Nico had phoned the house, twice, to speak to her, but she refused to take his calls. Eventually, her father had told him to leave his daughter in peace, that she'd been through enough. Even the Chief Inspector of police, Andy Bradshaw, had called in Liam and Adam and explained he'd only been doing his duty. Her brothers appreciated it, agreed with him and understood. But they were standing by their sister. Elena had been shaken up pretty badly. She needed time to assimilate everything that had happened to her. That's what family did, they stuck together through everything. They had each other's backs. The trouble was nobody at Ludlow Hall had her back that day. Not even the man who was supposed to love her, and Elena would never forget it, or forgive it.
She was suffering, a little voice told her, with a bad case of the Kennedy stubbornness gene. Actually, Elena responded. It was more like Karma. People get back what they put out there, so Nico and Marc and Andy could just suck it up.
Earlier in the day, she'd gone out for a long walk with Czar, like the good dog he was, loping along off the leash at her heel. And during that walk she'd taken time-out for herself, from the Christmas chaos of the family home, to just... think.