I remember once when I was seven, I fell out of a tree and broke my arm. After the initial shock of pain, I refused to show weakness. I bit my lip so hard that it bled and the doctors thought I’d cut it in the fall. But I didn’t cry. I didn’t react to the pain that shot through my body when they manipulated the arm for the x-rays. That was the first time my mother praised me for my strength—not only her, but the doctors and nurses, too—the first time I realized that pushing your emotions down was a benefit in this fucked up world.
But sometimes I wanted to fall apart in front of someone. Sometimes I wanted a gentle touch and a few soft, encouraging words. Sometimes I wanted to be weak.
The doorbell rang as I was about to drift to sleep. I sat up, wondering who would be ringing my bell in the middle of the afternoon. Naked save for my panties, I got up and slipped a silk bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door and made my way to the door.
Hayden pushed the door wide the moment I opened it, grabbing my arms and shoving me deep into the living room, kicking the door shut with his foot. I knew the look on his face and the need that burned in his eyes.
I pulled away from him and shed the robe, stepping out of his reach so that he could see what he wanted, but he couldn’t just take it. When he came toward me again, I ducked away and headed for the bedroom. Catching up to me instantly, he kissed me, shoving his tongue into my mouth with a possession that couldn’t be denied.
I responded to him, kissing him with as much heat as he kissed me. I moved my hips against him, lifting one leg and wrapping it around his thigh, tugging him even closer to me. His hands came down to cup my ass and lifted me so that we were the same height and so that his hard cock, still hidden in his slacks, was pressed just right against my wet cunt.
I was already ready for him, aching to take him inside of me. It was a joke to try to resist him in any way. I’d wanted him desperately almost from the first moment I met him. I knew it would always be Sam for him, but reason had long ago fled my building.
I tugged at his shirt, pulling it from his pants so that I could slide my hands up the length of his chest and touch all those places I’d come to know, those places I knew would bring him pleasure. And then down the back of his pants, gripping his rock hard ass, ripping at his flesh with my nails. He groaned against my mouth. He pulled back slightly, grabbing my bottom lip up between his teeth.
He suddenly dropped to his knees and ripped my panties from my body, yanking so hard there would be a mark on my thigh later. Then his mouth … oh, my God!
As well as I knew his body, he knew mine. He knew exactly where to touch, where to lick, where to nibble. And he was always so good about giving me what I needed physically, before taking for himself. The sensations that rushed through my body were enough to drive me absolutely out of my mind.
I buried my fingers in his hair, pushing and pulling. He knew what he was doing, knew how to push me close to the edge and draw me back. I cried out over and again, convinced nothing would ever feel this good ever again.
Just as I was about to go over, as the first tingles of that first orgasm began to dance in my lower belly, he stood. He was inside of me with one quick thrust, his cock thick and long, deeper inside of me than anyone had ever been before. He buried his hands against the back of my thighs, holding me still against his body, his touch bruising. The taste of my need was still on his lips, my juices wetting his beard. He shared it with me, pressing his mouth hard against mine once again.
It was a ride I’d been on before, but this was different. Was it me? Was it him? I wasn’t sure, but it was different. His hands softened as we kissed, his touch sliding over my hips, over my breasts. His mouth softened, too, his tongue becoming more of a welcome guest than a thief. And his movement, his thrusts, lost their pounding intensity and became almost gentle, almost lingering.
I didn’t care what was happening. I just went with it, loving the feel of his touch. And when he carried me into the bedroom, nearly tripping over his discarded clothing, I simply wrapped my body around him and welcomed him.
I stripped him of his remaining clothes and took the opportunity to explore his body, my hands roaming over his back, his hips, his ribs. I nibbled at his throat, tasted his shoulders, losing myself in the pleasure washing through my body.
My orgasm was building again, rushing toward its ending with a speed I wasn’t quite prepared for. And when it hit, I cried out, unable to stay stoic now. Hayden didn’t seem to notice. In fact, he brushed the hair from my face and watched the waves wash over me. And then he joined me, a moan escaping from his normally silent lips.
We lay there for a long moment, our bodies intertwined, our nerves still working in overdrive. He was the first to move, rolling onto his side. But he didn’t untangle himself from me as usual. He simply pulled me along with him. I took a chance, curling up against him and resting my head against his chest. Hayden kissed my hair and rested his chin on my head for a long, sweet moment before rolling off of me and out of bed.
He vanished into the bathroom and reappeared with a washcloth. With rough tenderness, he cleaned me up and pressed a kiss to the inside of my thighs before straightening to take care of himself. I closed my eyes, thankful he’d missed my tears.
Why can’t he ever be mine?
And then he was gone, the sound of the front door slamming reverberating throughout the house.
Chapter 17
Kevin
We’d done a background check on Jason Winston. I called Waverly and she did the check, calling me back just a few hours later with a list of arrests and comments from a friend of hers with the Lubbock police department. We knew who he was.
But, as it turned out, we apparently got it all wrong.
“What are you talking about?” Kirsten demanded.
I got up and crossed the room to her, took her hands in both of mine.
“His name isn’t even Jason Winston. He’s Clark Marshall, a thirty-five-year-old man from Chicago. The coroner put his picture and his dental records in a database and got a hit.”
“But I had a private detective check him out. He showed me a birth certificate!”
“It was clearly faked.”
“But how?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, babe. But Hayden and the people at Dragon are trying to find out.”
“He lied to us. He lied to everyone, even when he signed that pre-nup. He lied to Dallas!” She shook her head, pulling her hands away from me. “Why would someone do that? What was he really after?”
“My best guess? Her trust fund.”
She nodded, anger making her cheeks burn bright. “He was a gold digger after all. After all of this, I was right.” She bit her lip, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks. “I don’t want to be right like this.”
“I know.”
I drew her close to me, cradling her against my chest. She let go with a few little sobs, but then she pulled away again, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand.
“Does Dallas know? My parents?”
“I don’t know.”
She buried her fingers in her thick, dark hair. “Dallas must be going insane.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that right now. But I’m sure your parents have everything under control.”
“Mom and Dad are great, but they don’t know what to do or say. She needs us; she needs you and me. She needs someone who’s been heartbroken who can put it all in perspective for her.”
“I know. But we can’t go to her yet. The cops are probably watching her like a hawk.”
“If I could just call and hear her voice.”
“Not yet.”
She began to pace, clearly agitated by the whole damn thing. I couldn’t blame her. I was too. I wanted to be with Dallas. I wanted to be with my family, my parents and her parents, wanted to do my part to help them through this. But my priority was Kirsten, and that required that we stay as far from them as we could for the moment.
“We’ll find the truth and then we’ll be able to figure out who it was that killed him.”
“Do you think it was someone he was working with? A partner?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Fucking gold digger! He’s probably done this before, you know.”
“I’m sure he has.”
“Maybe it was one of his past victims.”
That had crossed my mind. But I couldn’t figure out why someone from his past would use Kirsten’s gun and set her up for the murder.
Unless, again, it was someone who knew her, someone with a personal grudge against her.
“Have any of your girlfriends had a nasty break up recently? Anyone go through a bad divorce?”
She shook her head. “My girlfriends are all happily married, most of them chasing babies around their fancy houses. Only Bobette isn’t married, but she’s a corporate lawyer with almost no free time on her hands. She doesn’t have time to date, let alone get jilted.”
“What about the staff at the ranch? Any of them recently have a heartbreak?”
“I don’t know. I don’t make a habit of getting into my employees’ personal lives!”
“Okay.”
I sat heavily on the edge of the couch, wondering what other possibilities there were. Kirsten didn’t spend a lot of time socializing. Running the ranch took up so much time that I couldn’t imagine she had time to go to parties and on long shopping trips. There was no friend on the fringe of her circle that might have developed a disliking for her, because she had a very tightknit group of friends, many of whom I knew and had been in touch with over the nine years I’d been gone. I knew it wasn’t any of them. It had to be someone on the ranch who was in a position to know intimate things about the family, but not close enough to Kirsten to take much notice. But who the hell was that?
“How many people are employed at the ranch now?”
Kirsten turned on her heel and stared at me. “Why do you want to know that?”
“Because someone framed you for murder and it has to be someone who knows you intimately.”
“No one knows me intimately.”
“Someone clearly does. Someone knew you didn’t want that marriage to take place. They knew where Dallas and Jason had run off to and also knew about your gun. They knew Jason well enough to kill him without causing a struggle.”
“If someone at the ranch knew Jason, they would have said something when he was there.”
“How long was he there?”
She shrugged. “Three days. And then Dallas and I argued about the fact that she wanted to marry him and they took off for Miami.”
“Where was the argument?”
“In the garden. We had just finished dinner when they announced it and I stormed off. She followed me and we argued. But there was no one else out there except for Jason.”
“Words carry in that garden, Kirsten. You know that.”
She glanced at me. “Yeah, but the only people out and about that late at night are people I trust. Trevor. Your dad. The household staff.”
“Who was on duty in the house that night?”
“I don’t know. Cook would have been in the kitchen. And Elizabeth. She was serving the food. And I think Tina might have been there that night.”
I leaned forward, thinking. I knew both Cook—the kindly woman had to be nearly seventy and preferred to go by Cook rather than her given name of Rhonda—and Tina. They were both older women who had been with the family as long as I could recall. Both trustworthy. I didn’t know Elizabeth, but she was Tina’s daughter.
Trevor wouldn’t hurt Kirsten. He adored her. And my dad … of course he wasn’t a suspect.
I didn’t understand. Who could have done this?
It all kept coming back to the same question. Why set up Kirsten? Why not Dallas? Why set anyone up at all? Was this some sort of message to the family? Was this a threat? Or was it as simple as a desperate person taking advantage of an opportunity?
It didn’t make sense.
Jason had let this person into his hotel room and allowed him or her close to him.
Who knew both Jason and Kirsten?
The only answer, at this point, was Dallas. But I knew Dallas hadn’t done it. Why would she? She loved this man. Besides, she was in my presence or Kirsten’s the entire stretch of time during which the crime was committed.
But the idea that a jilted lover had done it made sense.
I went to the dining room table and grabbed the cellphone Hayden had left last night. It was untraceable, a special phone made by Bradford Telecommunications that contained software developed by Megan’s brother some years ago that prevented anyone from tracing the calls it made or from finding its position using GPS.
“I have a thought,” I said when Hayden picked up on the other end. “Have you checked out this Jason … Clark person’s marriages? Is there a way to see who he was married to and what went down in the divorce? Is there a way to find out if he’s run a marriage scam before?”
“We’re a step ahead of you, Kevin,” Hayden said. “The police in Chicago inform us that several complaints were made against him years ago by some women who claimed he befriended them, ingratiating his way into their lives, and took off with a chunk of their money. But then the women withdrew their statements before the cops could do anything. One of the detectives thinks that Clark made restitution in some way.”
“After that?”
“Well, he used multiple aliases, so we’re having some trouble tracing his steps. But we do know that he married a wealthy widow in Colorado five years ago under the name Colin Wilson. That marriage ended in a divorce that made him a millionaire.”
“There have to be more.”
“Definitely. We’re still looking, but it could take time.”
“I think someone on the ranch recognized him. Someone he shafted once. I think someone who knew about Kirsten’s gun and who knew about the upcoming wedding also knew him.”
“That’s what we’re thinking, too.”
“You think someone I employ would do this to my family?” Kirsten demanded the moment I disconnected the call.
“I think it had to be someone who both knew you and him. Who else would know enough about you to do what this killer did?”
She frowned, clearly not able to quickly supply me with a name. But she also clearly didn’t like the idea.
“It just … everyone at the ranch has worked for my family for years. Why would one of them want to hurt me?”
“What about the new employees? The people you hired to handle the tourist stuff?”
Her eyes widened slightly, but then the hope that had come into them left.
“Jason never went down to the restaurant. As far as I know, he never left the house and gardens. He told Dallas that he wasn’t really comfortable around large animals.”
It was frustrating because I had this feeling that the answer was right there, right at the tip of my fingers. I just couldn’t pull it in.
We stood in the middle of a strange living room and stared at each other, both equally frustrated, both feeling the need to be anywhere else. I hated that feeling.
And then the world exploded around us.
Chapter 18
Hayden
“We need to find out what this guy—”
“There’s been an explosion!”
Everyone in the conference room turned, not sure what to think of Rhett’s interruption.
“What?” Megan asked, sounding a little less controlled than usual.
“At the safe house,” Rhett said, clearly agitated. “The cameras caught part of it. An explosion in the living room. We think maybe someone threw a grenade through the front windows.”
“Did they get out?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know. The security feeds went down immediately after the explosion. It looks like someone cut the power to the system.”
“No,” Dominic said. “That system is state of the ar
t. It has a separate power source.”
He would know. He designed it after he and his wife were attacked in that same house.
But I believed Rhett. And that came with the realization that we were fighting a bigger threat than we’d thought. I grabbed my suit coat and headed for the door.
“Get a team out there. Find out what the hell happened! And call Kasey in Miami. Find out if this is the cops or something else.”
“Hayden?” Megan grabbed my arm as I tried to charge past her.
“I know Kevin. I have a good idea where he’d go if he got out. I’m going to see if I’m right.”
“You’ll need back up.”
I shook my head. “No one knew they were in that house but the people in this room.”
Megan’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t like what I was implying, but she knew I was right. She let go of my arm.
“Keep us informed.”
I ran out the door, aware of eyes on me. Waverly, sitting in her corner all alone, watched me over the top of her computer, her eyes red and swollen despite the makeup she’d used to hide it. I’d hurt her this morning and the knowledge gave me no end of dismay. I was disgusted with myself, but somehow unable to cross whatever bridge it was that she had yet to knock down between us. If I didn’t come to some sort of decision soon, she’d burn that remaining connection and I’d be alone. Again.
Dominic was watching me, too, aware of what I was planning and not liking the idea of me doing it alone, just as Megan didn’t. Amelia was pretending to pay attention to what Peter and one of Waverly’s people were discussing, but her eyes were on me, too.
This was what happened when people started caring about you. You became responsible for their emotions. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s emotions.
Chapter 19
Kevin
The room exploded and a cloud of smoke immediately filled the room. I found Kirsten in the chaos and pulled her toward the back of the house, headed for the big windows in the master bedroom. I figured whoever had tossed the grenade would expect us to go for the garage or the back door. I hated to be predictable.
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