Buying Love (Marriage of Convenience With Twins Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  Dan rubbed his eyes and forced himself to stay seated as he waited for Linda to get him some kind of answer on the girls. She'd been on the phone all day, and the answer that she could come back with was that she had to go. Had to go, like that. Something had come up.

  They'd tried to question Sarah, which was remarkably poor timing. There was one other thing that she left him with, which was that she was getting the impression that people didn't want to talk to her. Why that was, she didn't care to wager a guess. That was who she was, as a person. She didn't like to make wild speculations.

  But on the other hand, her idea of wild speculation was anything that she couldn't prove in court. He didn't have that problem. There was no need to prove anything in court, if Dan Bryant said it.

  His words carried no legal weight, and all he had to do was suspect something, say it out loud, and if he was wrong, then it would be terribly naughty of him but it wouldn't change the fact that he said it, and it wouldn't mean that he hadn't planted the suspicion in someone else's mind.

  Right that moment, he suspected that someone else was involved in this. The timing was too good. She hadn't actually had custody, and the case against Sarah was so flimsy that Linda's entire summary of it had begun with a shrug. She didn't know why they thought they could take it to trial, but then again, maybe they didn't think they could.

  Maybe someone thought that they could get her out of the picture, get her arrested. Maybe they thought that would hurt him. Who the hell knows what was going on. But someone had enticed the Detroit Police Department to make an arrest on a complete nonsense charge, and he couldn't believe the idea that it had been a complete coincidence.

  Then, they came and got the girls from the hospital. From the hospital, for crying out loud! He frowned. There was a list of phone numbers he could call. Different people from the department of corrections, people from child services, people from a thousand different places, and he could call them one by one to ask what the fuck was their problem, and could they start getting all this figured out now, please?

  But he turned it over to the blank side of the sheet and started writing his own list.

  He pretended for a moment that it was a given that they were doing this as a way to hurt him. There was only one person who would want to hurt Sarah, and that one was dead, according to the police. So he was out. The rest were people who would target him.

  The list wasn't very long. He'd taken care to make sure of that, over the course of years and years. It was important to have friends in this business. Enemies were unavoidable, for anyone who wanted to be of any real importance, but you needed to have people smiling as you stepped on their backs to get what you needed.

  He started making calls. Three names crossed off the list. There was one left, but it was the one he'd suspected from the beginning, anyways. The closest anyone could come to wanting to hurt both him and Sarah, the only living connection between them.

  Robert Greer answered on the first ring. There was a long pause before he said anything, but Dan could hear him on the other end of the line. Breathing. Thinking about what he was going to say. That put him in a bad position all by itself. Why else would he need to be breathing like that, if there wasn't something suspicious going on?

  Dan let out another long breath and shook the thought off. It didn't matter.

  "Bobby?"

  "Oh, Dan. It's you."

  "I heard about your boy. Sad."

  "Yeah," Robert answered. He didn't sound as sad as Dan had expected. He'd known them five weeks, and if there was anyone who did anything to Allison or Chelsea, even now, he didn't know if there was anything that he wouldn't do to the person who hurt them. He could only imagine how broken up Sarah would be by it.

  But Robert Greer, who had known his son all his life, and by all accounts been a loving father, sounded like he was up shit creek, but he didn't sound like he was finding his way into the bottom of a bottle.

  "I just wanted to offer my condolences."

  "Yeah," Rob said. He sucked his breath in, real loud. "I heard what happened."

  "Yeah," Dan said. "I wanted to tell you myself, there was nothing I could've done. I didn't mean to hurt him, but I had to defend myself. Truth be told, I thought he was going to be just fine, other than the jail time."

  "I know," Robert said. His voice held a note that he probably did know, in spite of it all.

  "So if you know something about Sarah getting arrested, then I'd be much obliged to hear what you've got for me. What you've got for her, for that matter. Think of it as a favor."

  There was another breath. This one was sharper. He might have been angry, but then again, Dan didn't much care whether or not he was. If he didn't make the guy angry, then there wasn't much point in the conversation.

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Like hell you don't. You think CPS is going to show up less than twelve hours later to pick up some little girls from a mother who doesn't have them in the room with her?"

  "Oh yeah?"

  "I'm not an idiot, Rob. Someone decided they were going to kick me while I was down, and that same someone apparently decided that they were going to use those girls to do it. Now, call me crazy here, but I can't help but wonder if maybe their grandfather decided to get territorial."

  "I don't know what you're implying."

  "I'm not implying anything," Dan told him. "I'm telling you how I think it is. I think you're placing calls, spreading a little cash around, and I think you're trying to sink me. I don't know if this is about your son, or if you decided to let him off his leash as part of this plan, too, and he just got caught in the crossfire. But I want you to know something."

  There was a long pause. Maybe he expected Dan to finish the line all on his own, but Dan waited.

  "That seems like quite a theory, Mr. Bryant, but sure. You want to tell me something, go ahead and tell me. Don't act like a scared little child."

  "If you want to try to ruin my business, then do your worst. If you want to ruin my name, you want to drag my wife through the mud, a second time? Then fine. I can stomach humiliation, and since I know you're only hurting her to get to me, I'll stomach that, too, for a time. But if you touch one hair on those girls' heads, or if one hair is touched as a result of your actions, I'm coming after you. And there is no power in Heaven or on Earth that will stop me."

  There was another long silence. Dan's teeth clicked together, his fists working themselves into a tight ball. He didn't loosen them again. Just tight, and then tighter, and then tighter.

  He could hear Rob thinking. Hear the cogs turning in his head, like he was thinking about how much he could get away with. Preparing a statement, or something.

  There had been a time, once, where he thought of Rob Greer as a good guy. A friend, even, in the limited sense that someone could be a friend if you barely spoke.

  That was a long time past, now, and after this conversation, it wasn't going to be coming back any time soon. Dan didn't mourn the loss. Just waited for the other man to make some response. The words would have to come out of his mouth eventually.

  Maybe he would double down. Maybe he would confess the whole thing. Maybe none of those things would happen. But it wouldn't matter. Dan wasn't going to let this guy fuck with him, and the next step in not letting himself get dicked around was making it abundantly clear to the guy doing the dicking that the buck stopped there.

  Finally Rob broke the silence.

  "How far are you willing to go, Dan?"

  37

  Sarah was beginning to think that maybe there wasn't going to be anyone coming, and the truth was that in spite of herself, she couldn't think of what else she was supposed to do to avoid her fate. Someone had to come. They had to because she was locked in, and the best that she could do was to bang on the walls and scream.

  But then, she knew better than to believe that screaming would work. Banging, maybe. Screaming would just tear up her throat and fix nothing at all. So
she banged. Nobody came. Nobody seemed to notice or care. There was just a long wait for someone to come get her.

  She tried to think how long it had been. More than two hours, at the minimum. But she thought it was more like four or six. Impossibly long. Long enough that she'd started thinking about going to sleep in there, if it would pass the time any faster. It had worked in the holding cells, so it would have to work in the interrogation room.

  But she hadn't yet reached the point where she could bring herself to do it. Not yet. Not when someone would be coming any minute. She had a right to a lawyer. She had a lawyer. A lawyer who, at the very least, would be coming to tell her what she was supposed to be doing for her bail hearing.

  Within another thirty-six hours, she would have to be formally charged, and brought before a judge, or she would have to be let go. Habeas Corpus, the woman had said. That was how it worked. There was presumably more to it, or there wouldn't be a fancy Latin name for it, but that was the basics. That was the basics as it applied to her case, anyways.

  Sarah let out a long breath and banged on the door again. There was a long time, maybe a minute, where she expended every bit of whatever energy that she had on slamming against it. Her hands, until they hurt. Then her knee, until that hurt. Then her shoulder, and then her hip. Eventually, someone had to answer. But she couldn't keep doing this.

  The steel door was thick and heavy and she'd gotten tired forever ago. Now it was just a minute of furious activity because that was all that she could force out of herself. Sixty brief seconds, and at the end of it she'd accomplished nothing at all except tiring herself out.

  Sarah slid to the ground again, her head in her hands. She was going to go insane at this point. Then, as if in answer to her prayers, a miracle occurred. The bolt slid, loud and heavy in the door, and then it opened.

  "You're lucky if you don't get your badge revoked, you son of a bitch," a voice said. "If you think that nobody's going to hear about this, you're having a laugh. Mark my words!"

  Linda sounded different now. Before, she'd been all encouragement and niceness. She'd been a quiet woman. Now, there was a fire to her voice, and a husky quality that hadn't been there before. But she stepped through the door almost backwards. Her face was a mask of fury and frustration.

  "Oh, thank God," Sarah said. It was the first meaningful thing she'd said for as long as she could remember.

  "Sarah, babe, you're going to be okay. You're okay."

  "I was in here forever."

  "I know." Linda reached down and took Sarah's hand and helped her up. "Have you been given something to eat for dinner?"

  Sarah's eyes darted over to the man in the doorway. It was the tall man, not Rigsby. His partner. He was looking at her like there was a right and a wrong answer to the question, and she'd better know which was which, and which she was going to go with.

  "No, I haven't," Sarah said. It was the truth, and that was what she was always going to go with. It was just easier that way. There was a famous quote, that it was easier to tell the truth because that way you don't have to keep track of the lies. But that wasn't true.

  It was easy to keep telling the same lies because you always had the same reasons for lying. If it stopped mattering that you lied, then you could just tell the truth. The trouble with lying wasn't that it was hard to remember; it's that it's hard to make the whole thing consistent.

  Someone with a lot of time and effort into thinking up the perfect lie was one thing, but Sarah wasn't going to expend that time and effort. She wanted to have her life stay as simple as possible, and that meant telling the truth, because her lies weren't going to fit with everything else.

  The look on McCallister's face told her that she'd picked the wrong answer; the look on Linda's face as she turned to him wiped that expression off.

  "Get this woman something to eat, will you? Jesus Christ, I can't believe you people!"

  His jaw tightened, and Sarah felt the instinctive recoil in her gut, the feeling that he was going to lose his cool any second, and it would be an unpleasant ride until they'd stopped. Cole had a long history of losing his temper, and it took him a while to regain it.

  A pair of women, neither of them large, against a man with a gun, a taser, and more than two hundred pounds of muscle behind his blows, wasn't going to be an interesting match up. She was just going to suffer, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Then, as Sarah tensed for the blows that were about to come raining down on her, blows she didn't dare stop, the guy's jaw tightened further and he nodded. "I'll go see what I can do."

  "You do that," Linda called out as the door shut behind him. The bolt shut again, but now she had an ally. Someone who was going to get her out of here. Someone who knew how they ran this madhouse.

  "Linda, I thought, I don't know. I thought they were seriously going to leave me in here."

  "Mrs. Bryant? I've got some bad news."

  Sarah stiffened. Those weren't the words she wanted to hear. "Bad news?"

  "It's about your daughters."

  Sarah's heart thumped in her chest so hard and so loud that she thought it was about to explode. "Tell me everything's okay. They're not hurt, are they? They're alright?"

  "Someone seems to have called Child Protective Services on you. Because you're not in a position to take care of them, behind these bars, right?"

  Sarah's eyes widened. "Okay, so what do we do?"

  "We do exactly what we've been doing. We get you out of here, get the charges dropped. That's the easy part, frankly, because I've looked into things a little bit, and I don't see how they intend to prove anything. There's just... there's nothing there. I don't see any of it."

  "Okay, I hope you won't blame me for not being perfectly happy with that."

  Linda nodded. "I know. You're going to have to forgive me, I'm a little off my game today."

  "I know how that is," Sarah said. She knew exactly how it was, because she'd apparently been off her game for a long time. After an eternity stuck in a ten-by-ten room, though, she had no idea what her game was even supposed to be any more.

  "So what's next?"

  "What's next? God, a thousand things. First, you eat. Then we get them to give us access to a phone."

  "Us?"

  "Me, but I don't see why you should be cooped up in here the whole time."

  "Okay."

  "Do you know what time they brought you in here?"

  "A little after lunch? Maybe one o'clock?"

  Linda's eyes shut and she gained a sudden thick mask of serenity, like she'd painted it on with a brush. The attorney let out a long, slow breath. Then she took a deep breath in, and let it out. Long, slow.

  "Yeah, I'm thinking we'll be able to get you out of here."

  "What makes you think that?"

  Linda shrugged. "Same thing that I'm sure your husband is thinking right now, about why he's no-doubt decided you were arrested in the first place. Because there's a lot of potential for people to be embarrassed by the situation that we're in right now. Six and a half hours, alone in a holding cell, while you wait for your right to counsel?

  "With who your husband is, sweetie, I don't think they're going to want that in the papers. The District Attorney's going to take one look at your case, see how thin it is, and decide they're extremely interested in making sure that you're as pleased with them as punch."

  38

  Dan's face twisted up. There was a big part of him, a very big part, that wanted to get wrapped up in the whole thing. He'd been a very angry man for a very long time. That wasn't going to change now, no matter how much he wanted it to. But he'd been managing it for almost as long. He would even call what he had a measure of control over his mood.

  That control was just going to be tested very severely over the next few hours. Maybe the next few days. He had to back down in spite of himself, because that was what Sarah needed. That was what the girls needed.

  He took a deep breath, flipped the sheet back
to the useful side, and started dialing. There were a half dozen places left to call. He'd seen Linda make the calls for the past hour, and was starting to get a sense for how the conversation went.

  So when a woman's voice answered the other end of the line, halfway distracted like everyone at a telephone bank always sounded, he started the rigmarole that he'd watched her practice the entire time.

  "Hello, I'm Dan Bryant, I'm calling on behalf of my wife, Sarah. She's got two daughters, Allison Jones and Chelsea Jones, both about four months, and they were picked up by Child Protective Services a few hours ago."

  "Okay, sir, how can I help you?"

  "Well, the long and short of it is that I want to make sure that this is as painless an experience for everyone as possible. So I need to know what I'm supposed to do to get my wife's daughters back."

  "You're not their father?"

  "I'm not their father, no. It was a recent marriage and I just..." The thought hadn't really hit him before this. He hadn't even given serious consideration to adoption. Was he supposed to adopt them? Was that the right thing to do? He shook off the distraction after an instant. "Adoption hadn't happened yet."

  "Okay. So are you her legal representative?"

  He was used to this, in his own way. There was a certain way that people in business get used to talking. Halfway between apologetic and insistent. Not just firm, but solid as iron. Not just polite, but almost supplicant. He worked his way into trying to sound just about as pleasant as possible.

  "I'm real sorry, ma'am, but we're very short staffed here. My wife's lawyer is dealing with some other matters related to her case, and so I'm left here to make calls. If there's any decisions to be made, then I'm sure that eventually, we can get in touch about those."

  "Okay, well, what is it that you wanted to know?"

  "Like I said, I just needed to know what we were supposed to be doing to make this entire ordeal as quick and painless for both parties as possible."

  There was a long moment while the woman clicked and clacked at the keyboard.

  "We're showing reports that their mother... your wife is incarcerated. Is that correct?"