Harlequin Romantic Suspense July 2021 Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  Unless Josh pleaded guilty. Everything rested on that plea. If Jasmine’s younger brother would own up to his problem, he’d set them all free.

  And she’d know, once and for all, that she could trust herself, because she’d chosen to make love to Greg, to partner herself with him, over staying loyal to Josh’s case. She’d sensed that Greg could be trusted.

  Either way it went, he couldn’t have said no when she’d told him that she was exercising her belief in herself. It would be like telling a child that he knew better than the child did—like a pat on the head.

  And maybe...just maybe...he hoped that she’d see that her trust in him, no matter Josh’s outcome, was not misplaced. Maybe...just maybe...he hoped that she really did trust him. Because they were right for each other.

  Because their friendship was legitimate.

  The evening soiree was nice, but he was ready to get back to his folks’ place and excuse himself to bed long before they were ready to leave. They were in the process of getting to know all the key players in the company, seeing how they interacted and with whom. They’d invited Greg so that he could enjoy himself, but they were working.

  He ended up sitting out in the lobby texting with Jasmine. It was the only fun thing he could think of to do alone in Seattle on a Friday night.

  His folks were talking business five minutes after they were in the car. Greg was sitting in the front passenger due to his long legs, his mother in the back seat. She’d made the decision to switch seats with him when he’d hit puberty and shot up over a foot in six months, and the arrangement had been that way ever since. While his mother discussed what she’d noticed that night, Greg almost nodded off. The car’s motion, the darkness, the normality of his parents discussing people he didn’t know, people they’d be leaving within the next eighteen months, all relaxed him.

  He barely noticed the other car when it came careening around a corner, running a light and speeding straight toward them. His father, glancing in the rearview mirror as he spoke to Greg’s mother, didn’t see the hit coming right at him.

  “Dad!” he yelled, grabbing the wheel and swerving the car. The hit wasn’t head-on, but it was crushing. Loud. Throwing them all sideways as the oncoming vehicle drove into the driver’s side front fender.

  It all happened so fast Greg wasn’t even sure he was okay. He saw his father slumped over his airbag. Heard his mother’s screams. And pulled out his phone.

  * * *

  He remembered making the 911 call. He didn’t remember the conversation. His father wasn’t bleeding profusely from what he could see. Greg was more concerned about his mother. He’d never seen her cry before—except maybe in the movie theater.

  She’d gotten out of the car okay. Standing beside her husband’s door, she jerked on the handle but was unable to open it because of the front fender that was now smashed up into it. “Come on!” she cried as Greg reached her side, looking as best he could in the streetlight, to see that she wasn’t bleeding.

  “Mom.” He spoke firmly. “The ambulance is coming,” he told her, trying to lead her away from the car. His father was unconscious. He’d felt a strong pulse, though. He knew better than to move him. “Are you hurt?” he asked as she yanked once again on the door.

  Taking a hold of her hand, he pried her fingers from the handle and pulled her just a few inches away. Enough that he could get her attention. “Look at me,” he said, hating the shakiness he could hear in his voice. It would only alarm her further.

  It got her to look at him. “Are you okay?” he asked again. “Do you hurt anywhere?”

  She rubbed her forehead. Shook her head. “I... No. I don’t think so,” she said. “Oh God, Greg, your father! Is he going to be okay? Is he?” Her voice rose as she clutched the lapel of Greg’s dress coat. Her other hand grabbed hold as well and she was clinging to him. Pulling on him. “Is he going to be okay?” she almost squealed.

  “I think so.” He couldn’t lie to her. But the pulse had been strong. He told her so. And as sirens sounded in the distance, she slumped against him, sobbing, and he wished Jasmine, with her seemingly endless emotional strength, was there to help him get through whatever was coming.

  Holding his mother, rubbing the back of her head, he choked up, too. Hardly aware when a couple of tears slid down his cheeks. Seeing his father like that...

  The man was in perfect health.

  A rock.

  Greg’s rock.

  CHAPTER 19

  Jasmine couldn’t fall asleep Friday night. She’d been texting with Greg until he’d said his parents were ready to head home. She’d thought he’d message her when he got there, but she didn’t hear from him. And didn’t know if their friendship had room for her to get nervous and follow up. Or if she’d seem like some kind of clinging ninny.

  Josh had been quiet that night during his call with Bella. He’d read to her. Kissed her good-night. Told her he loved her. But there’d been none of the playfulness that usually accompanied the ritual. Once Bella had been tucked in, he’d explained why.

  He’d heard from his lawyer, who wanted to meet with him on Monday to go over disclosures from the prosecutor’s office and talk about settlement.

  “He wants me to accept a plea, Jas,” he’d said. “He’s really putting on the pressure, and I just can’t do it.”

  “Then don’t.” Her reply had been instantaneous, because she understood. After all they’d been through, to admit to being an abuser when you weren’t one...her heart broke at even the thought of him doing that.

  He’d told her that his attorney thought there’d be less fallout in terms of his professional life if he settled things quietly, got counseling and moved on. He said he couldn’t lie about something so vile, though.

  And he couldn’t bear the thought of a DV conviction tied to his name for a minute, let alone for the rest of his life. The only way to have that charge go away was to win at trial.

  She wanted to tell him to stay strong and go to trial. She knew they’d win. But she didn’t. She did, however, fully support his stance, which she told him as strongly as she could. He’d met with the attorney who handled family law that day, someone Ryder had referred to them, and had a lot to talk to her about there, too. Different options. She didn’t even want him thinking about giving up his daughter.

  The whole idea of it was just too cruel.

  And then she didn’t hear from Greg when he got back to his parents’ place Friday night.

  He hadn’t said he’d text again. Or call.

  But it was the first night since their first kiss that he hadn’t done so.

  The first night since they’d made love.

  Sometime after two, she finally settled down. She’d told him she trusted him. She had to do so. For him. But for herself, and her family, too.

  She was going to get this one right.

  * * *

  Two hours of pacing later, of watching his mother go back and forth between the calm, contained woman he’d always known and a panicked, fear-filled, helpless near-invalid, Greg saw the doctor come toward them in the emergency waiting room.

  They were the only ones there at that hour of the morning.

  “He’s going to be all right,” the man said before the door to the room had even closed behind him. Both Greg and his mother had been checked out and cleared shortly after they’d arrived. “He’s awake and talking. Asking to see you both. He doesn’t believe me when I tell him that you’re both fine.” The man spoke with barely a breath, and Greg was intent on catching every word, while he held his mother up at his side.

  The second she heard the news, she’d slumped against him, burying her face in his rib cage.

  “He doesn’t remember the accident, and he’s got one hell of a headache,” Dr. Miller added. “He’s concussed, so we’re going to hold him overnight, but you can stay with him if you’d l
ike. We’ll have him up in a room in about fifteen minutes or so. Someone will come get you.”

  “So...other than the concussion he’s fine?” Greg asked as his mother stood up, still looking elegant in her black lace dress and silk shawl as she looked at the doctor.

  “He’s bruised, going to be sore, maybe a bit whiplashed, but everything else checks out fine. His vitals are great.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Greg said, seeing the tears roll down his mother’s cheeks again. With a nod, Dr. Miller turned to go.

  “Doctor?” Greg’s mother called out. And when the man turned, she said, “Thank you,” in as regal a voice, albeit laced with sincerity and gratitude, as Greg had ever heard.

  * * *

  The night was long. Surreal. The three of them dozed intermittently in his father’s private room. They’d brought in a second hospital bed, and Greg had insisted his mother use it. He took the reclining chair. She adjusted the head of her bed to a sitting position. And Greg didn’t recline.

  Events from the accident on kept replaying in his mind. His mother’s lack of control. Not that he blamed her—at all—but he just never would have believed...

  His own shakiness.

  The way he’d been right there with his mother the whole time. Needing to be right there. Holding her. Dealing with the emotion, not just the facts.

  “What?” she asked, causing his father to look at him, too. It had to be three in the morning.

  “What, what?” he asked her.

  “You’re sitting over there, shaking your head.”

  Any other night he’d have come up with some generic yet truthful response. That night he couldn’t find one.

  “I just...the whole night...us, here now. We don’t do this,” he said.

  “Your father and I both stayed in the hospital with you the night you had your tonsils out,” his mother said.

  He’d been about four and vaguely remembered that.

  “I meant—I don’t know. It’s just been a weird night.”

  “I fell apart on him,” his mother told his father. “I just...when I saw you slumped there and I couldn’t get the car door open...”

  “They had to jimmy it to get you out,” Greg piped in.

  “It’s all a blur. I was so scared. I think I started to scream and yank on the door.”

  “You did.” And he’d known what to do. How to help her. Not just with the phone call. The details. But he’d been able to comfort her.

  “I don’t know what I’d have done without you there,” she told Greg, as though she’d been reading his mind.

  She knew him well.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d think you could rely on me for emotional support,” he told her. She never had before.

  “Why ever not?” Both of his parents were looking at him now.

  “Because. I’m not that guy. I’m the one who handles the details.” They knew him better than anyone.

  “Greg, what on earth are you talking about?” His mother sat up, away from the back of the bed. “You’re my son. You and your father, you’ve always been the sources of my strength. My comfort. You remember the time I thought I had a tumor? You held my hand and told me everything would be all right, and I just knew somehow it would.”

  He kind of remembered. He’d been a kid. What had he known?

  “You’ve always been such a deep, sensitive guy,” she told him. He stared at her. Needing her to stop. And wishing his father wasn’t sitting there, hearing this, watching him.

  “I am not deep or sensitive,” he told her. “I’m the guy on the sidelines, making sure that whatever needs to happen, happens.”

  “You’re very reliable, yes, and smart, and good at keeping track of details,” she told him, “but you’re aware and sensitive, too.”

  She had the wrong man. Maybe she’d worked it up in her head that he was as she wanted him to be. Mothers had a tendency to think the best of their kids.

  “You keep it inside,” his mother said. “I blame your father and myself for a lot of that.”

  His father harrumphed, and Greg glanced over, expecting to see disagreement on his face. Instead, he was nodding.

  “All the moving around. We never gave you a chance to bond with other kids. Or have a pet. Or a sense of community.”

  “I had you two,” he reminded them. “That’s all I ever needed.” These people had rescued him—a thrown-out piece of humanity—from a public restroom and made him their son. How could they think...

  “We thought so at the time,” his mother continued. “We thought our love would be enough, but look at you, Greg, thirty-two years old and no relationship. No wife or grandkids in sight. And now I’m hearing this nonsense about you not caring?”

  “My God, boy, you care more than any man I know,” his father boomed. “More than is good for you sometimes, maybe.”

  He didn’t get that.

  “You let the guilt from your breakup with that Liv woman eat you alive...”

  “I let her down, Dad. Because I have no empathy...”

  “You didn’t love her, son,” his mother piped in. “It wasn’t a lack of empathy. It was a lack of love. And I’m afraid, because of how you came into the world, coupled with the fact that you had little opportunity to bond as a child, that you aren’t going to let yourself be open to happiness.”

  How in the hell had they gone from a normal family weekend, to a car accident and worry over his father’s life, to him being some deep guy not open to love?

  “And your career,” his father said, as though pick-on-Greg night was the only thing on the agenda.

  “I know, you don’t understand how I could give up a lucrative law career to...”

  “You might want to let me finish,” the older man said in a tone that Greg automatically respected.

  “Go ahead,” he said, instead of the “yes, sir,” he might have issued in years past.

  “In the first place, I wouldn’t call working in the prosecutor’s office a lucrative law career. Those guys are grossly underpaid, in my opinion. However, your choice to be there was typical of you. You weren’t in it for the money. You were in it because you honestly cared about justice being served. And you cared too much to have your hands tied, which is why you left. Both of which made me proud as hell.”

  Greg shook his head. Irritated. Maybe a little pissed at them both. But not wanting to get up and walk out.

  Of course, it was late, he was exhausted, and the chair was comfortable.

  “Just for the record,” he spat out, “I’m not closed off to love.”

  “You just have to find the right woman,” his mother said. “Like I found your father.”

  He heard her words in a different voice. In a different form. Lila McDaniels Mantle, at The Lemonade Stand, the day she was grilling him about Jasmine. “Why you?” she’d said to him. “Why should you be the one saving this particular life?”

  He’d thought she was way out of line. Hadn’t wanted to hear anything she might have been trying to tell him, any warning she might have been trying to give him.

  “I have to say, Dad, Mom was kind of a screaming banshee tonight,” he said, trying for a grin, to get them out of the emotional turmoil they’d fallen into. As a family, they tended to avoid this stuff.

  At least he thought they had. Maybe they’d just been unbelievably lucky enough to be happy. A happy family that enjoyed being together.

  “I thought I was going to lose you,” his mother told his father with one of the looks Greg had been witnessing his entire life. The one that just told you for sure that they were connected way beyond laws of the land. “I don’t know what I’d do without either one of you,” she said, tearing up again as she looked from him to his dad.

  He’d always thought she was just a calm, strong person. When, in fact, he’d just never h
ad to witness her deeply afraid or hurting. Funny how a little perspective changed so much.

  Funny, too, how when you loved someone, you just knew how to be there for them.

  He hadn’t loved Liv. Not his fault. Not something he could control. Not like she’d needed to be loved. Rick did, though.

  In that moment, Greg knew that he wanted a home like he and his parents had shared. A home filled with love and loved ones. With a child to raise and teach and know better than they knew themselves sometimes.

  He wanted to be biologically related to someone he knew, but even more, he wanted to be in a committed, loving relationship with a woman, in one residence, and to raise a family with her.

  Expecting his father to make some kind of pithy remark that would make his mother smile, Greg was surprised yet again when, instead, his father took his mother’s hand, then reached out a hand to Greg on his other side. “We just need to be thankful that the good Lord didn’t think tonight was the right time to separate us, and maybe we ought to talk about the stuff that matters a bit more.”

  Bowing his head, Greg wondered if the entire world had just gone mad.

  Or somehow righted itself.

  * * *

  Jasmine was still asleep when her phone rang just after seven Saturday morning. Throwing her legs over the side of the bed, she pushed to answer so she could silence the ring as she rushed into Bella’s room to find the little girl still sound asleep.

  And then headed back to her room. “Hello?” she said, as though she hadn’t been waiting most of the night to hear from Greg.

  “Hey, is this too early? Did I wake you?”

  He sounded different.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I just... We were in an accident last night on the way home from the dinner...”

  His voice continued on. Jasmine heard about his father being okay. About them all spending the night in the hospital. But she listened from afar.

  The relief flooding through made her mind fuzzy and her body shake. She cuddled up under the covers, pulling herself together and asking for all the details. The other guy had been arrested at the scene and charged with drunk driving, with other charges expected to follow.