Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One

by Michelle St. James

  The man led her to a booth away from the windows at the back of the restaurant. He waited for her to slide into one side before he took the other, like he expected her to bolt or something. Then he was there, right across from her, his eyes a lighter, truer blue than they’d seemed in the shadowed alley.

  The waitress from behind the counter appeared next to their table and set down two menus. “Something to drink?”

  Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her pert nose sprinkled with freckles. Her name tag identified her as Maggie.

  Julia was relieved for the excuse to tear her eyes from the man across from her. She would drown in those eyes if she wasn’t careful.

  “Coffee, black,” she said.

  “Same,” the man said.

  “Be right back,” the waitress said.

  When Julia returned her gaze to the man across from her, he was staring at her intently. “Hungry?” he asked, gesturing at the menu.

  She was, but she wasn’t here to eat. “No.”

  He nodded. “Want to clean up that leg?”

  It took her a minute to understand what he was asking, to remember the scrape she’d sustained on her calf when she’d fallen on the cobblestone behind Seth’s brownstone.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “You should start talking.”

  “Here you are,” the waitress said, setting two cups of coffee down the table. “What else can I get you?”

  Julia opened her mouth to say something and was interrupted by the man across from her, who proceeded to order pancakes, two eggs over-medium, a side of bacon, hash browns, and a cheeseburger.

  The waitress appeared nonplussed by the giant post-midnight order, but Julia was surprised. Not by the man’s appetite — he was huge, well over six feet tall, his broad shoulders stretching the fabric of his jacket, muscled pecs pulling his T-shirt tight — but by the casualness with which he ordered.

  She was on pins and needles, wondering what he had to say to her, what he might know about Seth that would help her find her sister. He, on the other hand, was acting like it was perfectly normal to chase a stranger in a back alley, pin her to the ground, then take her for coffee and three meals worth of food.

  “What?” he asked when he noticed her staring.

  “Hungry?”

  His smile was slow and a little lazy. “Always.”

  Was she imagining the innuendo in the words?

  She returned to safer ground. “No more interruptions.”

  He nodded and took a drink of his coffee. “I was casing Campbell’s place of residence when I saw you standing under the stairs next door.”

  Place of residence. She registered the clinical term with interest. Was he a cop? A private investigator?

  “And?” she prompted.

  He shrugged. “You know the rest.”

  She shook her head. “Not good enough. Why were you casing Seth?”

  He turned the diner mug in his massive hand. “Let’s just say it’s part of my work.”

  “You’re a cop? A PI?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  She moved to leave.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “You said you’d tell me what you were doing there. You didn’t say I’d have to pull it out of you. I don’t have time for games.”

  He leaned back in the booth. “Stay. Please.”

  “Give me a reason to stay,” she said.

  He hesitated. “My work necessitates discretion.”

  “Not my problem,” Julia said. “We had a deal.”

  The waitress reappeared with the food and set everything down. After being reassured that they didn’t need anything else, she refilled their coffee and retreated to the counter.

  He started working through the eggs. She waited for him to chew, swallow, wipe his mouth.

  “I was hired to look into Seth Campbell,” he finally said. “That’s why I was watching his place.”

  She sensed there was a lot left unsaid. “Hired to look into him?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Why?” She didn’t bother asking for the name of his client. She already knew that would be a nonstarter.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss my client’s case,” he said. “Besides, it’s your turn.”

  “My turn?”

  “I told you something. It’s your turn to tell me something,” he said.

  She met his eyes, felt herself falling into them again. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine?”

  “That was our agreement.”

  She twisted her napkin, thinking about Elise, about what she could tell this man that wouldn’t further endanger her sister, a question that was impossible to answer without knowing who he — or his client — was.

  He said he’d been hired, so that meant he wasn’t a cop. Not anymore, although she wouldn’t be surprised if he had been a cop once.

  No, that didn’t feel right either. He was too sharp for a former cop, too physical. Ex-military? She could see it, could sense the kind of quiet, dangerous energy coiled under his skin that made sense for someone who’d been deployed.

  In any case, he was in the private sector somewhere, and he was spying on Seth, just like her.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend…

  “I’m looking for my sister,” she finally said.

  His expression went stony. “Your sister.”

  Julia nodded. “She went missing a couple of weeks ago. She was seeing Seth Campbell in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, and I — ”

  He moved to get out of the booth. “Fuck.”

  “Wait!” She put a hand on his wrist, suddenly desperate to stop him. She’d been alone with her private fears about Elise and Seth so long, it was a relief to talk to someone about them, even in so cryptic a conversation. “What’s wrong? Where are you going?”

  He stopped moving and turned his eyes on her. “I can’t talk to you about this anymore.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

  He met her eyes. “You’re Julia Berenger.”

  She flinched and shrank back into the booth. “How do you know my name?”

  “Because it came up in the dossiers my firm compiled when we were hired to take a look at Campbell.”

  “The dossiers…” She shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sorry your sister is missing. I’m sorry that bastard Campbell might have something to do with it. I’m sorry I can’t say more than that my firm has been hired to look into Campbell as it connects to your sister’s disappearance. But I’ve told you too much already, and I can’t tell you more than I have.”

  He reached for his wallet, threw cash onto the table, and stood to leave. “If Campbell is involved with your sister’s disappearance, he’s dangerous. Stay home and let the professionals do their work.”

  Her cheeks burned as he headed out of the diner, his words echoing in her mind.

  Stay home and let the professionals do their work.

  Anger rushed her body like a hot summer wind. She scooted out of the booth and hurried after him.

  “Everything okay?” the waitress called after her from behind the counter.

  Julia pushed through the glass door. The cold night air invigorated her rage, propelling her toward the figure walking back the way they’d come.

  She jogged to catch up, watched him turn, his face weary as he heard her approach.

  He opened his mouth to speak but she didn’t give him the chance.

  “Let the professionals do their work?” She was shouting, but she didn’t care. There was no one around to hear. And besides, it felt good to shout, felt good to loose her rage on this man who had stumbled on her stakeout, one she’d obviously been maintaining longer than him. “If the professionals had done their work, my sister wouldn’t be missing. If the people who were supposed to keep guys like Seth in check were doing their work, he wouldn’
t have had a chance to fuck with someone like my sister. If the police pulled their head out of their asses long enough to do their work, maybe they’d have found her by now.” She should stop. She knew she should stop. But the words just kept on coming. “Do you think I want to be out here? Do you think I want to spend my nights staring at Seth’s house, hoping he’ll lead me to my sister? That I enjoy pacing my apartment at night, wondering what could be happening to her? That I like spending time online, hearing about the sick fucks who do things to girls like Elise, trying to get into their online playrooms, which are basically just clubhouses for a bunch of overgrown little boys who still need to hurt a girl to get her attention?” She was panting with exertion, her cheeks hot with rage.

  He stared down at her, his expression unreadable, the city holding its breath.

  “Let’s go.” He turned away.

  “Go where?” she asked.

  “Your leg needs attention,” he said. “And we shouldn’t be having this conversation here.”

  9

  It was a mistake. Probably the biggest mistake of his life, and most definitely the biggest mistake of his career in the private sector.

  The woman following him up the stairs was the granddaughter of a client, the granddaughter of John Taylor, and from the sound of things, she had no idea her grandfather had hired them to go after Campbell.

  He’d known she looked familiar, but it wasn’t until she mentioned her missing sister that he’d put the pieces together. There hadn’t been a picture of Julia Berenger in the background they’d done on the Campbell job — they limited their background to only the necessary as a matter of principle, no point compromising someone’s privacy if they could avoid it — but she resembled her sister enough that her face had struck a chord.

  Then he’d known he was in trouble.

  “Where are we?” she asked as they stepped into the courtyard of the house he shared with his brothers.

  “My house.” He resisted the urge to curse. This was all kinds of fucked, but he hadn’t known where else to take her. “Don’t worry. You’re safe here.”

  He was relieved to see the lights off in the kitchen and living area, Nick and Declan occupied with their separate lives instead of hanging out on the sofa arguing and laughing as the three of them did when they didn’t have plans.

  Ronan turned right toward the private door that led to his wing of the house, something he’d insisted they each have if they were going to share a living space.

  “This is a big place,” she said.

  “I don’t live here alone.”

  “Oh.”

  “I live here with my brothers,” he said, not wanting her to think he had a wife and four kids secreted away in the house. “We’re in business together.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  He paged through his options for extricating himself from the situation — a situation that seemed to grow more complicated by the minute — as he unlocked the door leading to his living room.

  She stepped in after him and he deactivated the alarm and locked the door.

  He flipped a switch and the room was flooded with soft light. Chief trotted toward them, sniffing Julia’s leg, and she bent to pet the dog.

  “Hello! Aren’t you a beauty?” She scratched around Chief’s ears. “What’s your name?”

  “Her name’s Chief,” Ronan said, annoyed that Chief licked Julia’s face like a long-lost friend. “Chief, go to bed.”

  The dog walked over to her cushion in the living room and laid down with a sigh.

  “Chief,” Julia said. “That’s… interesting.”

  He wasn’t about to explain. The less Julia Berenger knew about him, the better.

  She looked around and he tried to see the space as she saw it — the modest living area open to the kitchen, the overstuffed leather sofa on the decorative rug, the expensive media equipment and professional photographs he’d started collecting when he got back from Afghanistan.

  “This is nice,” she said.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked. “Tea? More coffee?”

  “I think I’m all coffeed out,” she said.

  He set his keys on the marble island that separated the kitchen from the living area and removed a bottle of bourbon from a cabinet in the living room. “Something stronger?”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  She wandered the room, looked at the books lining the built-in bookshelves while he pulled two glasses from the cabinet and poured an inch of liquid in each.

  He felt unaccountably nervous and immediately scolded himself. Jesus fuck. Just because he hadn’t had a woman in the house in almost two years was no reason to get weak-kneed, especially not with Julia Berenger, who wasn’t some potential conquest he’d picked up in a bar, who could never be a potential conquest of any sort now that he realized the firm was working for her grandfather.

  He shouldn’t be thinking about her at all beyond the fact that she was an unexpected complication.

  Lucky for him, unexpected complications were his specialty. He’d had his share of them in Afghanistan and at least as many since he’d been home. Hell, he was raised on unexpected complications. He would clean up her wound, get her to back off Campbell while he reassessed the merit of taking the Elise Berenger case, and send her on her way.

  He capped the bottle and crossed the room to hand her one of the glasses. She turned her gaze on him as she clinked her glass against his and he was struck by the thick fringe of her lashes, the brown of her eyes sparking with amber in the light.

  Looking into them was like falling into a blanket of soft fur.

  Fuck him.

  They drank and he set his glass on the bookshelf. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get some stuff to clean up that leg.”

  She looked down, like she’d just remembered the wound that had torn her jeans. “It’s nothing. I’ll take care of it when I get home.”

  “I’m not sending you back out into the night with a bleeding leg.”

  He headed for the powder room off the hall and dug out the first aid kit. When he returned to the living room, she was perched on the arm of the sofa, looking around the room, her gaze sharp and clinical.

  He could almost see her sorting and cataloging, saving her impressions for processing later on. She was a beauty, her curves soft and lush in the light of the room, but he had the distinct feeling it would be a mistake to underestimate her.

  He poured warm water into a bowl in the kitchen and plucked a clean dishrag from one of the drawers.

  He needed to get her out of there ASAP.

  It was late. It had been too long since he’d been with a woman. It was bad timing, a moment of weakness.

  Nothing more.

  He set the water on the coffee table and studied her jeans. It looked like she’d been poured into them, the swell of her hips and thighs one with the black denim.

  “I don’t suppose you can roll those up?”

  She looked down at her jeans. “Um, doubtful.” She set her glass down and stood. “But seriously, this is silly. I’m fine. It’s just a scrape. Let’s just hash out this whole… situation, and call it a night.”

  “Come with me,” he said, heading for the hall. When she didn’t follow, he turned around. “I have some sweats you can borrow. We’ll take care of your leg. Then we’ll hash out this situation.”

  She followed him down the hall, past the one guest bedroom in his suite and into the master bedroom.

  It was too big for him, too luxurious. After years spent sleeping in tents and barracks, and sometimes under trees, all he needed to be happy was a bed, a blanket, and a pillow.

  But when they’d been choosing furnishings for the house, Nick had made fun of Ronan’s “monastic” choices until he’d relented. He still didn’t need the king-size bed with six-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets or the modern furniture, but he was glad he wasn’t showing Julia Berenger to a tiny room with a single bed and a hook on the wall.


  He bent to the bureau and removed a pair of gray sweats. “They’ll be big, but they’ll make it easier to reach that leg.” He gestured to the open door at one side of the room. “Bathroom’s over there.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked, taking the sweats from his hand.

  “You’ve lost someone.” He looked away, searching for the right words, not wanting to take her hope that her sister would be found alive. “It’s probably temporary, but right now, your sister is gone. Let’s just say I know a little bit about that.”

  He turned and left the room, closing the door behind him before he could say more. He’d said too much already.

  10

  Julia looked at the closed door, trying to get her head around how she’d gone from staking out Seth’s brownstone to ending up in what looked like a mansion with a locked vault of a man who checked every box in her fantasies, including the one where he didn’t talk too much.

  She didn’t even know his name.

  She went into the bathroom, an expanse of white marble and designer tile, the faucets and hardware shimmering under the soft lights.

  She sighed when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror lining one wall. She was a mess, her hair a rat’s nest of tangles, her face smudged with what must have been dirt from her tussle with the man in the alley behind Seth’s house.

  “Great,” she muttered.

  She rinsed her face and dried it on one of the hand towels stacked on a gleaming brass shelf. She eyed the comb sitting on the counter next to the sink, then decided it would be a bridge too far and opted for a quick and largely ineffective detangle with her fingers instead.

  She studied her reflection and found it moderately more presentable, then wondered why it mattered. This wasn’t a date. The man in the other room had tackled her to the ground in the alley, had admitted to watching the brownstone with binoculars.

  It didn’t matter that he was six feet four inches of perfection, that his eyes were an open sea at dead calm, that he looked at her like he already knew a lot more about her than her name, that he knew all the things she’d never admitted even to herself.