Secrets of the A-List Box Set, Volume 1

by Joss Wood

  “I... Don’t judge me, okay?”

  “Judge you?” His voice was hoarse. “You kidding? I’ve got your back, Ellie.”

  She smiled at the childhood nickname that only her dad used these days.

  “What is it?” There was urgency in his tone, urgency Elana was quick to read as impatience with her, rather than any more personal bent.

  The assuredness she’d had that morning shifted, drifting away for a moment. Marriage. Becoming a wife. A frisson ran down her spine.

  “I’m... I’m just not sure I can go through with the wedding.”

  A shocked silence surrounded them, heavy with recrimination and disbelief. Incredulity, too.

  Taking his silence for censure—and heaven knew she’d had enough of that in her life—Elana rushed to explain herself. “It doesn’t feel right without Dad. How can I get married when he’s lying in a hospital bed? You don’t think I should, do you?”

  Rafe put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his chest. He was warm and strong. He held her tight, stroking her hair, waiting for her to calm down, and then he loosened his grip. “Have you spoken to Thom about this?”

  She nodded jerkily. Canceling the wedding at this stage would be a disaster. Her mom would flip. So would Thom’s parents. As for Thom, he’d made his feelings perfectly clear that morning.

  “This morning,” Elana murmured. “At least, I tried to broach it, but he wasn’t what you’d call receptive.”

  “Of course he wasn’t,” Rafe said with a hint of reproach. “He loves you. He proposed to you. And you guys have gone and invited pretty much everyone on the Forbes rich list, and all their friends. I think it’s a done deal now.”

  “That’s not helping,” she muttered, shaking her head.

  Rafe jammed his hands in his pockets, and Elana could see that the conversation was making him uncomfortable. She was pretty sure she could guess why, too. How many times had she failed to meet their family’s expectations? In fact, it was pretty much the only thing she was good at. Here she’d gone and done something no one had expected—she’d landed a sexy, gorgeous, wealthy, socially comparable bachelor as her fiancé and she wanted to bolt.

  “I’m not going to do anything stupid,” she promised. “I just wondered if maybe we should wait a bit. Until we know what’s going on with Dad.”

  Rafe kicked the toe of his loafer into the graveled drive. “Yeah, well, what if he never wakes up? You can’t put your life on hold forever.”

  Elana paled visibly. It was almost exactly what Thom had said. “Jesus Christ. Forgive me for not being able to be so cavalier about my dad’s possible death.”

  “He’s my dad, too,” Rafe pointed out with infuriating calm. “I’m not being cavalier about it.” He expelled a sigh. “I just feel like there’s something else going on here.”

  Elana opened her mouth and then closed it again. Her eyes didn’t quite meet Rafe’s. “You’re paranoid,” she said finally, weakly. “I’m still reeling from all this. His life is literally hanging in the balance and I’m supposed to be staring down the barrel of festivity central? I’m just not there.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Dad happier than when you and Thom got engaged,” Rafe murmured.

  “So?” Elana’s one-word response was the definition of stubborn.

  “So—” Rafe’s smile seemed forced “—do you think he’d want you to put the whole thing off?”

  Elana spun around and pressed her back to the sun-warmed sedan. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Rafe, she felt more estranged than she had in a long time. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said gently, bumping his shoulder to hers.

  “God. Why are you so damned fired up for this wedding to go ahead?”

  Elana sliced her gaze to his face and could have sworn she saw something like guilt dance in his eyes. Only for a second, and then it was gone.

  When Rafe spoke, it was with an apparently relaxed demeanor. “I just don’t want you to make a mistake because you’re upset.”

  A mistake? When Elana thought about marrying Thom, she had the same sensation as if she’d been dropped off the edge of a cliff and was in free fall. Splatting against the sidewalk was inevitable. Was it a mistake to ignore that intuition?

  “We’re all on edge right now. If you ask me, this is a time to stay the course and stick to what we know is right.”

  There was something in the way Rafe spoke that made her feel that she wasn’t quite seeing the entire picture. Rafe was the brother who listened to her. The guy who didn’t judge her for not being cut from the same dependable cloth as he and Luc were. So why wasn’t he listening now?

  “I want you to be happy,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I just think... Thom’s a great guy.”

  Thom was a great guy. Elana knew that. He just wasn’t necessarily the guy for her. She let out a small frown and shook her head slowly from side to side. “I think this whole thing’s just got me shaken up.”

  “We’re all worried about Dad—”

  “I don’t just mean Dad,” Elana interrupted. “I mean, of course, he’s right there at the top of my list. But what about all this other stuff? How can he have had this Fixer person running things, behind our backs?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Rafe said softly. “It doesn’t seem like him to keep secrets.”

  “But he did. And big ones.”

  “Even Mom seemed blindsided,” Rafe agreed.

  “Poor Mom.” It was such a ludicrous description of the strong, fearsome Mariella Santiago-Marshall that they both laughed. It felt great to release steam. Elana put a hand on Rafe’s arm and shook her head, her eyes meeting his. “You know what I mean.”

  He sobered. Of course he did. “She worked so closely with Dad. How could he have kept this, even from her?”

  “I worked closely with him, too.” Elana winced. “I work closely with him. I think we should stick to present tense, don’t you?”

  He nodded, a sense of urgency pushing him to confront the issue rather than grammar. “And? Did you ever notice anything?”

  She bit down on her lower lip, the deep red lipstick cushioning against her teeth. “I don’t know.” She shrugged her slim shoulders, and a sea breeze rustled past, lifting a wisp of her dark hair over her shoulder. She pushed it back distractedly. “At the time, no, but now that I think about it?”

  “Like what?” Rafe’s breath caught in his throat.

  “He’s always really secretive about his office. I used to think it was just because he liked his privacy, but now? I don’t know.”

  “You don’t think it was because you sprayed his office with Bollinger after your high school graduation?”

  She laughed, because she knew it was expected of her, but Elana couldn’t stand being reminded of her past faults. All the many, many missteps she’d taken in her short life. She’d been drunk at the time, and it had seemed funny. But it had also been a long time ago. Elana wasn’t the only one who saw marrying Thom as a new start for her. She was certain that her family thought her irresponsible behavior would end the very second she said ‘I do.’

  “That was ages ago,” she said, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “And he didn’t like you going in there, either.”

  “No,” Rafe murmured, his eyes narrowing. “Dad was good at keeping me at a distance.”

  Elana nodded, sympathy squeezing out her own sense of hurt. “Okay, Luc then,” she muttered. “The whole family was kept out of his office, and we never questioned that.”

  “Because we trusted him,” Rafe said simply. “As did Mom.”

  “She must be freaking out,” Elana said with a shake of her dark head.

  “I have to believe this is all a misunderstanding,” Rafe said after
a moment of quiet reflection had passed. “Dad’s a good guy. He loves us, loves this family. If he’s involved in business with the Fixer, he must have thought it was the right thing to do...”

  “So why keep him or her a secret? Even from Mom?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafe said. “Let’s just hope he wakes up soon so we can ask him.”

  Elana might not have been as academic as her siblings, but when it came to people, she had an innate talent to understand them. She pushed off the car and came to face Rafe. “No, Rafe. We have to find out what’s going on. Otherwise I think... I think we could be in danger.”

  Rafe laughed, until he realized she wasn’t joking. “Oh, come on, Elana! You’re making this out to be some b-grade MISSION IMPOSSIBLE spin-off.”

  “Don’t dismiss this,” she said softly. “I’ve been thinking about it all night.” When she wasn’t thinking about ending her engagement or being screwed senseless by Jarrod Jones, anyway. “Something about this is really off.”

  “No, it’s not. Dad had a car accident and we found out there’s something a little strange going on in his business. Something he’ll probably be able to explain away when he wakes up.”

  “What if it wasn’t an accident?”

  Rafe was very still. A thread of tension ran down his spine. Was it possible Elana was on to something?

  “What do you mean?”

  “Call it a hunch,” she said quietly. “But I think there’s way more going on here than we can see. And there’s one person I can think of who’ll be able to give us some damned answers.”

  Rafe lifted a single dark brow.

  “The Fixer,” she hissed impatiently. “Whoever the Fixer is, we need to find out. And we need to demand he or she tells us what happened.”

  “You say that like it’s going to be easy,” Rafe said. “But Dad was able to keep this person hidden from his own family—probably for years.”

  “But we weren’t looking before.” Elana lifted her head as the sound of tires crunching on gravel alerted them to Luc’s arrival. He pulled the car up just behind Rafe’s and opened his door. He flicked off the ignition, and Elana’s eyes winged together as she studied her oldest brother through the tinted windshield of the car.

  Luc Marshall was different from her and Rafe. He was the most like Harrison—determined, intelligent and ruthless when he needed to be. Was it possible that the Fixer was far closer than they’d imagined? She lifted her face to Rafe’s and saw the same speculation in his expression.

  “What’s going on?” Luc asked as he stepped out of the vehicle, his glance encompassing the both of them. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  * * *

  The Polo Club sat perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. From the four-level building there were views in all directions—over the polo fields and then the ocean on one side, toward the mountains and forest on the other. It was one of their earliest acquisitions and it had always been special to Mariella for that reason.

  At one time it had been the jewel in their crown. Mariella pulled into her reserved space and looked at it for a moment, feeling the swelling of pride that never failed to fill her when she contemplated how far she and Harrison had come.

  This building was symbolic of that. It had history and prestige, like her when she’d met Harrison. But when they’d bought it, the previous owners had let it slide, so that the attention to detail and quality were no longer in place. Nobody believed it could be transformed.

  Just like her parents had sworn she would regret marrying a nobody like Harrison Marshall. He hadn’t been good enough for Mariella Santiago. So they’d said!

  How wrong they’d been. Three children, an empire, and thirty-two years of marriage to the man had shown her how important it was to hold fast. She had stood up to her parents and married Harrison despite their disapproval, and she would stand by him now, even when confusion about this mysterious Fixer made her wonder how many secrets he’d been keeping from her.

  How adroitly he’d maneuvered this entire portion of his life away from her. How trusting she’d been—when he’d received calls and excused himself from the room, she had never doubted it was a business matter. A real business matter, not something strange with this sideline concern of his.

  But she wouldn’t judge him. She was determined to listen to his explanation, and that meant waiting for him to wake up. And he would wake up. Just like he’d won her heart, faced her parents, and gone from a chef to a restaurateur to a billionaire.

  Mariella squared her shoulders and stepped from the car, her slim frame silhouetted by the midday sun. It was a warm day. She relished the sensation of the heat on her back as she moved through the enormous glass doors.

  She remembered the first party they’d hosted in the elegant ballroom. It had been a sensational affair—European royalty, sheikhs, American celebrities. Now, the restaurant and bar were busy. She moved past the din of conversation with her head bent and sunglasses in place, avoiding being drawn into any unnecessary conversation.

  The staircase was made of marble and the banister was gold; an enormous crystal chandelier hung perfectly above it. Mariella took the stairs with her head still tipped forward, her mind running over Harrison, her children and the empire that she would need to keep in her own control. Not the Fixer’s.

  The ballroom had been designed for maximum impact. It took the entire top floor of the building and had windows on either side, covered in dark red curtains. Mariella paused a couple of steps from the top and drew in a steadying breath then continued up. She removed her glasses at the top, sliding them into their case and replacing them in her handbag without breaking her step.

  “Veronica,” she said as she entered, her gaze landing on the woman instantly. Veronica Waterhouse, a former Miss America, was still whippet thin and extraordinarily beautiful. Like most of her contemporaries, she’d had so many little modifications to her face that she hadn’t just halted the aging process—she’d reversed it and shaved several decades off her appearance.

  “Mariella.” Her accent was clipped, courtesy no doubt of the sort of finishing school that women of her generation and social sphere had been encouraged to attend.

  Mariella eyed Veronica’s cocktail, a full glass beside an empty, and nodded to one of the milling staff. “Mimosa.”

  The bartender made a small gesture of understanding, and Mariella sat with ingrained elegance in the seat opposite Veronica. “I take it there’s a problem?” she prompted, trying to keep her irritation from her voice. “With the wedding?”

  Veronica compressed her lips. “I hope not. I need everything to be just perfect. I’ve promised Katherine that her wedding will be the last word in style.” Veronica leaned forward conspiratorially. “Of course, you know what it’s like when they’re getting married. I imagine you’re going through this exact same thing with Elana. First they want this, then they want that—so many decisions, only one wedding.” Veronica laughed, a brittle sound in the cavernous space. “We hope!”

  Mariella nodded, but her mind was rejecting the statement. After all, Elana had barely shown a glimmer of interest in her wedding plans. Weddings aren’t really my thing. Why don’t you surprise me? she’d told Mariella. The sense that it was slightly odd settled uncomfortably around Mariela’s shoulder. It was not something she had any mental space to reflect upon. Elana had always been a law unto herself.

  “Yes, well, we want it to be just right. What would Katherine like?”

  “Initially she was happy with the idea of caviar-topped oysters, but it seems Chester’s become mixed up in a conservation cause,” Veronica said with a hint of distaste. “Apparently caviar is on their hit list.”

  Mariella suppressed an urge to roll her eyes. “Our caviar is the world’s finest, but if it would upset Chester...”

  “Apparently it would,
” Veronica was quick to agree. “Which would, in turn, upset Katherine. And...”

  “We can’t have that,” Mariella clipped, beyond grateful when her drink appeared. She ran her finger up the stem of her mimosa. “We always source nonspawning Kumamoto oysters. They’re delicious on their own. We’ll skip the caviar.”

  Veronica winced. “The problem is,” she said with a smile that bordered on apologetic, “Chester II is allergic, and Veronica thinks it might seem disrespectful...”

  “I see,” Mariella said, nodding, moving a hand beneath the table and digging her fingernails into her thigh. “There was an excellent salmon sashimi with wasabi foam and wakame wrap served at the Vanderbilt fund-raiser last month,” she murmured. Harrison had raved about it.

  “Oh. The one at MOMA?”

  Mariella tilted her head in a small show of agreement.

  “That’s more the ticket,” Veronica said with a nod, her lips pursed as if to say that only something good enough for the Vanderbilts would suit her little darling’s wedding.

  How dare this woman bring Mariella to the Polo Club to discuss something as banal as the canapé selection for an event that was months away when Harrison was lying comatose? “I trust the coconut shrimp are safe?” Mariella mentioned the last item on the list, and Veronica nodded.

  “They may come under Chester II’s allergy list, but I do so love a good coconut shrimp. They stay.”

  Mariella nodded. Her mimosa was finished and so, too, she hoped, was this conversation. As if somehow reading her thoughts and sending her a lifeline, Mariella’s phone began to ring.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, fishing it from the bag with a tight smile. Gabe’s picture looked back at her. Grateful as ever for her nephew’s innate ability to know exactly what she needed and when, she flicked a gaze at Veronica. “I have to take this.” She stood and moved a little away from the table, unconsciously drawn to the view of the ocean. The bright green of the polo fields was the perfect underscore to the drama of the sea. Her eyes chased the light that bobbed across the waves, following its glittering path all the way to the horizon.