“You agreed to a divorce.”
“Yeah, but I made sure the paperwork would get lost so that if he ever filed for a marriage license…well, you know.”
“You set us up.”
“When he came around and started talking about you…Harley, this, and Harley, that…I got tired of it really fast. But I couldn’t tell him that. There were other ways to sabotage your relationship.”
“What did you think was going to happen, Margaret? That I would leave him over your ill-fated marriage and you would swoop in to save the day? Not the best plan in the world.”
“No, but it worked for a while. And then Bonnie came to me and told me what Daddy was up to. Told me how you had something you were taking to a reporter that would ruin Daddy’s reputation and possibly put him in jail. I couldn’t let you do that. So, I figured if you were dead, it would kill two birds with one stone…if you know what I mean.”
“Is that why? You thought you would win Xander back if I was dead.”
“I thought that I’d waited long enough. I’ve known Xander Boggs since I was five years old. He was mine to do with as I pleased. And then you walked in and suddenly he doesn’t have time to have dinner with me, to listen to my troubles, to be my date to the occasional party. Breaking up with you wasn’t enough. I needed you gone.”
“You wanted him because he was no longer alone and miserable. Because he wasn’t free to be your second choice.”
“He was mine first. And you…you come along, and it’s not enough to steal Xander from me. You had to steal my daddy, too.”
I shook my head, disgusted by her selfishness. “You could have gone and found a man of your own.”
“I had two men: Daddy and Xander.”
“So you drove the car that hit me.”
“You’re too predictable, Harley. You jog past that damn storefront every morning at the same time every day. All I had to do was wait around the block. When you went past, I just gunned it. If you hadn’t turned and seen me, I probably would have smashed you against the concrete wall of that building, but you turned and the angle wasn’t right. That’s why you flew into that stupid palm tree instead.”
I nodded. I could see it; I had seen it multiple times in my memories since climbing out of bed this morning. I kept telling myself that I was remembering it wrong, that my memory was playing tricks on me. But it was there, strong and definitive. And exactly how she described it.
“So what do you want now? Do you think that I’m just going to walk away now that everything is over, now that Xander and I are finally back together?”
“Oh, I know you won’t. But you know, this part of Los Angeles is nice and everything, but there has been a string of home invasions in this neighborhood over the last few months. A woman even got shot a few blocks over when she surprised the burglars at work.”
As she said it, she pulled a gun out from under the table. It was a good-sized piece, a forty-five maybe. I grew up on a ranch in Texas. I knew guns. And I knew a gun that size had a good kick, but it was also accurate. And the human body makes for a pretty big target.
I stepped back against the wall and held my arms up so that she could see my hands.
“You really can’t believe that Xander won’t put two and two together and figure out what you’ve done.”
“He’ll forgive me just like Daddy did.”
“Your dad?”
“Who do you think helped me get the car fixed after your little accident? You may be a petite girl, but you left one hell of a dent in the front of my car.”
“Grant knew?”
“Of course he knew. He sent me out of town for a few days, had the car fixed, and made sure no one saw me at the scene. He might even have paid off the cops, but I’m not too sure about that. It’s not something he talks about often.”
“You can’t really think that Xander would be as understanding. He doesn’t have the same bond with you that your father does.”
She stood slowly, coming toward me with the gun outstretched between us. “Xander loves me. He always has. If I’d told him about the accident, he would have helped me just like Daddy did. He did it once before. What’s another hit and run when you’ve already walked down that road?”
“If you love him, how can you be so unaware of who he is as a person?”
Margaret’s face tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that Xander carried around a hell of a lot of guilt after the first accident. Do you know that he stayed in contact with the victim? That he used to send him money and that he sends money to his daughter now? Did you know that Xander attended the trial that sent the man to jail for nine years, and that he plans to go to his first parole hearing in six months?”
Margaret stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.
“He doesn’t do that.”
“He does. And when he first told me about it, he said he was driving. That’s how much he cares about you. He never told anyone the truth until today. Until he was trying to save your dad from his own fate.”
“Xander?”
“He was the one feeding the feds information on your dad. Did you know that? Did you know they threatened his mother? Did you know that what I was doing that day, trying to meet with that reporter, was just to protect Xander?”
“But Xander wouldn’t turn on my dad. He knows how much that would hurt me.”
“Yeah, well, he was doing it. Maybe his mother meant more to him than you.”
Margaret shook her head, her dark eyes widened by emotion. Her hand was shaking. I thought that maybe if I timed it right, I could knock it out of her hand. But then her focus cleared, and she stared at me.
“You’re lying. You’re just trying to upset me so that you can run. But that’s not happening.”
“I’m just telling you the truth, Margaret. No one is really who you think they are. Not even Xander.”
Tears started to roll down her cheeks. “All I know is that my dad is going to jail because of you. And Xander is gone because of you. That’s all that matters.”
I inclined my head slightly. “You saw Xander when I was in the hospital. You saw how he refused to leave my side, saw how he brought me here even when I didn’t know who he was. Do you really think he’d get over my death that easily?”
“I’ll help him through it.”
She gestured with the gun. “Let’s go into the sitting room. It’ll be more believable there.”
I reluctantly turned, leading the way. She poked the gun into my back, causing me to step wrong on my injured leg. I stumbled and nearly fell. My hand slammed into the wall and my chest followed. I suddenly realized that Xander’s cellphone was in the front pocket of the shirt, and I carefully took it out and held it in my palm.
Margaret grabbed my arm and pulled me up straight.
“Come on, let’s go.”
“My leg,” I moaned, stumbling slightly again.
She groaned, but she held me under my arm to help me into the sitting room.
Xander’s phone was small, several generations behind the iPhone. I teased him about being too attached to the thing, but I was glad he still had it now. Margaret could see it if I held my hand at the right angle. And I knew the phone the phone fairly intimately. I’d watched Xander use it millions of times, and I’d dialed it for him over and again whenever we went on long drives together. I knew exactly which set of hot buttons to use to get the person I wanted.
I just had to stall a few minutes longer.
“You realize he’s just upstairs, waiting for me to come back with ice cream, right?”
“Then we need to hurry.”
“He’ll hear the shot.”
“It’ll take him a few seconds to get down here. By then I’ll be out the kitchen door.”
“What if you don’t kill me with your first shot? I can tell him who did it.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to get it right with the first shot.”
She was
serious. And I could see that she’d worked it all out ahead of time. Her eyes were…why had I never seen it before? She was like a lost puppy, a child who’d seen too much of the realities of the world. She was broken. I felt sorry for her.
“Can I look out at the backyard one last time,” I asked. “It’s my favorite spot in this entire city.”
“It’s dark.”
“I could flip on the lights.”
“And alert Xander? I don’t think so.”
Not enough time had gone by. I had to find another way to distract her. But I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Please, Margaret. This isn’t going to get you what you want.”
As I waited for common sense, or just a piece of reality, to sink its way into Margaret’s mind, I was beginning to think that it was already too late. That this was really going to happen. I wasn’t ready to die.
And then I heard footsteps on the stairs, and a new fear blossomed in my chest.
“Hey, babe,” Xander called. “What’s taking so long?”
Margaret raised the muzzle of her gun. I leapt at her, pushing off from my healing leg in a move that was probably not very smart. The gun went off, but I managed to hit the muzzle before it did, and the bullet smashed into the ceiling. I fell to the floor, but Margaret came with me, our bodies tangled in a mess of limbs. And then Xander was there, and Margaret was screaming as she fought me for control of the gun. It went off again and the room seemed to go dark, and I was lying there, my ears ringing. And another shot and another and all I could think about was Xander.
Chapter 35
Xander
Harley was taking so long getting the ice cream that I finally went to find her. As I was coming down the stairs, I thought I heard voices. And then I turned the corner into the sitting room just as a gun fired.
All I could thing was, Fuck!
Margaret was on the floor with Harley tangled up next to her, and they were struggling over this damn big gun. I reached in, tried to untangle them and get one or both up on their feet. And then Margaret pressed the barrel of the gun against Harley’s side and wrapped her finger around the trigger. I did the only thing I could think of and that was to grab her wrist and yank. I felt something give and then the gun went off.
The next thing I know, Margaret’s on her feet, the gun pointed at my chest. There’s blood, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. And Harley is still on the floor.
“Why, Xander?” Margaret asked, her wrist limp where I broke it trying to pull her away from Harley. She calmly changed hands, holding the gun with her other hand now. She pointed it at me, tears running down her face and her hand shaking so bad the gun won’t aim straight. “Why did you turn on Daddy? Why did you have to choose her over me?”
“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Margaret.”
“I already regret it all,” she said softly.
She held the gun up not far from the center of my face and steadied it the best she could. I saw movement behind her and felt relief because I thought it was Harley. But then the gun went off, and I closed my eyes, thinking I was dead. But when the body hit the ground, it wasn’t mine.
It was Margaret.
And Jonnie was standing behind her, a pistol in her hands.
I dropped to my knees, my hands moving over Harley’s body. There was blood, but I couldn’t find a place on her that was injured. And then I realized the blood was dripping from my body, from the perfectly round hole in my shoulder.
And Margaret. She was coughing and blood was flowing from between her lips. Jonnie was with her, pressing her hands against a bloody wound on her side.
“Harley?”
Her eyes fluttered, and she focused on me. When she saw the wound on my shoulder, she immediately sat up, but then she did something of a swoon and fell back again.
“Are you hurt?”
“My leg.”
Her leg. I looked down and realized it’d gotten trapped under the edge of the couch. She must have reinjured it in the fight. I gently pulled it out and saw that it was already swelling.
“They told you not to walk around without the boot.”
“Yes, well, I wasn’t planning in wrestling on the floor tonight.”
I lifted her leg and kissed the swelling area. She winced but giggled a little at the same time.
“My hero,” she said.
An ambulance arrived a few minutes later. I didn’t have a chance to ask Jonnie how she happened to be there, or how she happened to have a gun. She disappeared before the ambulance arrived. When asked what happened, Harley gave them an abbreviated version that didn’t include Jonnie. Being the good boy that I sometimes am, I followed suit.
I wouldn’t find out until later that Philip’s help hadn’t been all bad. It turned out that Jonnie, my trusted office manager, was once a prodigy for the CIA. But after some inner-office politics left her out of the promotion game, she quit and applied to work for my fledgling company. And me, being the super-security-conscious guy I am, got the wool pulled over my eyes by a few friends that she had left at the CIA. But one of those same friends also clued her in to what I was up to, and Philip’s contacts got in touch with her, giving her information about both sides of the investigation.
She was the one who’d come to Harley this morning, and she’d told Harley the truth about who she was and what she was up to. But she begged Harley not to tell me because she liked her job and wanted to keep it.
Like I would have fired her for being a bad ass.
And then Harley speed dialed her when Margaret had the gun on her, so she came over. And disappeared for the same reason. She wanted to keep the life she’d built here in Los Angeles. Having the cops writing a report about how she killed a civilian wouldn’t allow for that.
It was finally over.
I’d said that before, but I believed it now.
Chapter 36
Harley—Nine Months Later
I started to laugh as my little sister twerked her way down the aisle of my parent’s Baptist church. If Daddy walked in and saw that, there would be hell to pay.
Xander pulled me back against his chest as he, too, laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from deep in his chest. I loved to hear him laugh like that.
“Do you dare me to do that during the ceremony tomorrow?” Shelly asked.
“I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you do,” Charlie called to her.
I smacked my brother on the arm.
“What?”
“Don’t encourage her.”
“Hey, someone’s got to inject a little levity into this whole affair. And it can’t be at my wedding because if you think our parents are bad, wait until you meet Vanessa’s.”
“When’s Vanessa going to be here?”
“In the morning.”
“Cutting it close.”
Xander’s arms tightened around my waist, his hands wrapping around my swollen belly. “I think we all are, aren’t we?”
I groaned. This whole wedding thing wasn’t my idea. It was my dad’s. He insisted that we be married in a church. A ceremony on a beach, no matter who the preacher was, was not good enough. The marriage vows had to be sanctioned in God’s house.
Especially with a baby due in three months.
I just wanted to go home, curl up in front of the television, and enjoy my new life as a couch potato, but Xander had agreed with my dad. We should do it properly.
The men in my life were beginning to take over everything.
Bonnie walked in, her expression softening when she lay eyes on her son. She looked good. She had just come back from a long cruise to the Bahamas. After the trial and everything that followed, everyone agreed that she deserved the break.
Grant followed close behind her. He’d cut a deal with the feds. In exchange for giving up his law license, his practice, and paying a substantive fine, they agreed to give him just six months of parole and a thousand hours of community service. And his testimony against each o
f the key players in the terrorist scheme.
Turned out Grant’s clients were planning to set bombs at each of those properties they’d been buying up because they were set near important targets, such as one that was near the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.
Everyone involved has been arrested. Careers have been made or destroyed because of Grant’s testimony. And the terror attacks have been thwarted.
Margaret, on the other hand, was not as lucky.
She survived the gunshot Jonnie put in her belly. But was charged with hit and run and attempted murder. Her lawyer advised her to take a plea, but she chose to go to trial. She was found guilty a month ago and will be sentenced at the end of the year. She’ll likely get twenty to life.
Xander feels horrible about what happened that night. I try to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t predict how Margaret would respond to everything that was happening. And he took a bullet for me. How many women can say their husbands did that?
We’re moving on with our lives.
Xander and I have decided to move to Texas. We’ve purchased a piece of land not far from my parents, and we’ll put a house on it one day soon. Right now, we have a little house in the city that we’re enjoying.
Xander still runs his security firm, but he lets Jonnie do most of the everyday stuff. He even lets her chose the clients, which has significantly reduced the amount of tension between the two of them. I guess he figures if she was once considered a lethal weapon, then maybe she knows what she’s talking about when she says a client is too hot for the company.
And we’re getting married. Again.
***
I feel like there’s a bowling ball strapped to my stomach, as I wait for the music to begin. It’s so hot that I feel like I’m suffocating. But then my dad takes my arm and he walks me down the aisle, and I see Xander smiling as he watches me. He’s dressed in a dark tuxedo that he had tailored-made just for this day. It came out perfectly. It fit him like a glove. I wished I could have worn the dress I’d had designed for our wedding, the one that was cancelled over a year ago. But seeing Xander there, none of the discomfort mattered anymore.
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