by Bromberg, K.
“You’d be amazed at the things money can buy,” she says, and I roll my shoulders in frustration.
I’m not a peon. She knows who I am and no doubt has researched my net worth, so I grit my teeth at her little holier-than-thou dig at me.
“The American people won’t buy it. Are you just going to stand by and let him ruin your reputation too in the process?”
“I’d rather not discuss this right now. It’s too painful.” She says the words, but it’s not pain lacing her voice. Rather, it’s irritation at me for asking the glaringly obvious question.
“Okay.” I sigh into the line to let her know my own frustration. “Any luck on the assets and accounts?” I ask.
“I’m working on it.”
I lean back in my chair and rest my feet on the desk, crossing them at the ankles. The night is coming on—the city’s lights sparkling to life—and I try to figure out what is going on here, because she’s been working on it for some time now.
“I’m on your side here, Bianca. If there’s something I need to know, it’s important that you tell me.”
“Nothing that matters in the divorce.”
“Got it.” But I don’t get it. Far from it.
“Mr. Lockhart. You know what I need. I’m paying you more than adequately for your services.”
“As you sought me out.”
“Are you still the best there is?” she asks, her voice hinting at irritation.
“Yes.”
“Then I made the right decision. Don’t make me doubt it again.”
When the connection ends, I pull my cell from my ear and stare at it like an idiot, more confused about the conversation than when I started.
Is the woman transferring offshore bank accounts into an alias or something to cheat Carter out of them? Is that why it’s taking so goddamn long getting me her assets and financials? Something is going on, but fuck if I know what that something is.
Warm definitely isn’t a term one would use to describe Bianca. Not in the least.
“You ready for me?” Stuart asks as he comes in carrying a file box that has me raising an eyebrow.
I glance at my watch to check the time. “Yeah. I’ve got to head out in an hour or two, but we can go through what you’ve brought me.”
It takes Stu a minute to stack piles on my desk in order of client and file. We wade through whether we can use the information or not, if the facts can hold up in negotiations, and if we’d rather hold it close to our vest for a bit longer to see how everything pans out during mediation.
We also discuss the information he’s gathered on the clients I’m representing so there are no surprises from opposing counsel.
“We good?” I ask.
“Got a bit more for you on your other interest,” he says, referring to my request for him to dig deeper on Vaughn and her past.
“Is that so?” I ask, feeling like an asshole for uncovering everything about her layer by layer without her knowledge, but I know I’m only doing it because I’m trying to protect her from Carter.
“Her last name is technically not Sanders.”
I do a double take when I look at him, a little put off, a lot confused, and try not to be pissed that I didn’t know this. “Continue.”
“Her father’s name was Henson, but she wasn’t given his last name.”
“True, but Vaughn told me her mom’s family didn’t accept him. I bet you money her mom talked him into using the family surname with some excuse about inheritance simply because she was too chickenshit to go against her parents.”
“It happens.”
“More than you think.” I scrub a hand over my jaw. “So then what’s the last name on her birth certificate?”
“Dillinger.” It takes a second for the name to hit my ears and recognition to fire. The Dillingers of Greenwich. Stuart sees the minute it does and nods. “Yes, she’s one of those Dillingers.”
“Well, shit.” I rise from my desk and walk to the windows as I wrap my mind around all this. The small world we live in. This unexpected connection Vaughn and I somehow unknowingly share. And the quiet fury that rages beneath my more than calm demeanor . . . but Stuart knows I’m trying to rein it in. He knows better than to talk right now.
“So her last name is Dillinger?”
“Up until she was seven years old it was. Then her mother filed for a legal name change to Sanders. I’m assuming there were reasons for her to give her children the maiden name of their maternal great-great-grandmother, but none that I could find.”
I slide my hands into my pockets, and I continue to stare out the window but never really focus on a single detail.
I think of my college roommate, Chance Dillinger, and the stories he’d tell me of his cold family steeped in generations of tradition. The old-school rules they adhered to that weren’t allowed to bend to modern ways. Marriage only to those with a specific bloodline. The requirement for the males of the family to be sent to boarding school and away from their mothers so they’d never get soft. Soft men don’t become captains of industry.
How convenient that they send all the boys of the family away so all the little girls are left as perfect prey for their perverted uncle. My stomach churns.
“It’s a good name. Sanders,” I finally say. “A hell of a lot better than Dillinger.”
“Mmm.” It’s all he says in response, and I can hear him shuffling through papers. “The interesting thing is I messed up first go ’round. She has two uncles named James. Both brilliant in their own right. One named Dillinger. Another named Sanders.”
“And you thought the Sanders one was—”
“—the one you were looking for. Yes.”
“It makes sense why there was nothing there,” I finish for him, referring to why we couldn’t find anything nefarious on the James Sanders we’d found . . . but then again, there aren’t often neon signs pointing to child predators. “Anything on James Dillinger?”
Stuart’s silence weighs down the room until I turn around to face him. His look says everything.
“What?” I ask.
“Things don’t exactly add up.”
I walk toward the desk, take a seat in my chair, and study the papers he’s laid out on it. I shuffle through them, each one confusing me more than the last.
“I don’t understand.” I pick up the two arrest warrants—Vaughn’s name is front and center on the first, Samantha’s on the second one—almost as if I don’t believe what I’m seeing.
“James Dillinger is a paraplegic.” Stuart’s eyes meet mine.
“And?”
“And those papers”—he points to the arrest warrant naming one Samantha Dillinger for attempted murder—“state that she’s the one who pulled the trigger.”
“The fucker deserved it.” It’s my automatic response, my moral compassion for a man who preyed on young girls less than nil.
“Not going to argue with you there . . . but your girl here is in some serious trouble.”
I stare at the warrant. At the charge of accessory to attempted murder. At the name “Vaughn Dillinger” on it. And while none of it makes any sort of sense to me, I know it would be perfect for a man like Carter Preston to see. To threaten with. To hold over Vaughn’s head to try to coerce her—to blackmail her—into doing exactly what he wanted.
“How come it names her as Vaughn Dillinger and not Vaughn Sanders?” I ask. “Same goes for Samantha?”
“Maybe the Dillingers rejected how her mother changed her name? Maybe they felt slighted and wanted to claim her back?”
“Or maybe they didn’t want her caught?” I propose.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if she legally goes by Vaughn Sanders, then file the warrant under Vaughn Sanders and it’s easier for the law to search for her and find her. File the warrant under a name she doesn’t legally hold and . . .”
“And it’s a window dressing for everyone to think you’re prosecuting.”
I twist my lips an
d lower myself to my seat and try to imagine myself in Vaughn and Samantha’s shoes. Scared, motherless, abused. The need to survive, to thrive, and Samantha’s need to protect her sister from that monster at any cost.
Good for you, Samantha. I never met you, but I admire you more now than ever. Protect what’s yours at all costs.
Just like I will.
With a purse of my lips, I toss the copies of the warrants onto the table, lean back in my chair, and meet Stuart’s eyes.
“Something doesn’t make sense here.”
“You feel it too?” he asks as he mimics my posture and sits back in his chair.
“You have an extremely wealthy family. One many know and who have a shit ton of power and influence. One of their prized sons is a fucking pedophile. Maybe they know it, maybe they don’t. But they keep it on the down low if they do, because why risk the scandal that would tarnish their family name, right?” I rise from my seat, my need to work through my thoughts while on my feet as inherent in me as my need for air.
“But then their prized son ends up getting shot.”
“Maybe it’s in his niece’s room in the middle of the night. How would one explain why he was there and why she shot him? Then maybe said niece and sister leave and never come back.” I twist my lips, my eyes veering to the corner of my office in thought. They land on the box Vaughn sent me. It’s still sitting under my credenza, still opened but its contents not fully gone through.
Still reminding me of the hurt I caused her.
“And maybe one niece knows what happened and the other one doesn’t.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” I say with a laugh, but fuck if it doesn’t make perfect sense.
“It is . . . but if you’re a wealthy family trying to hide a secret . . .” His words lead into my thoughts.
“So what are you saying? That there are accusations made of attempted murder against two young teenagers. A robbery gone wrong is what those statements make it sound like. Like they were ungrateful orphans the Dillingers took in. They took care of them, but they were so messed up by the death of their mother that nothing—not even the love and money the Dillingers lavished upon them—could fix them.”
“Are you thinking they pressed charges on principle only?”
“I’m saying money can buy you a shitload of things, including pressing charges and an arrest warrant that never got followed through on.” I turn to look at him. His elbow is on the chair, and he’s running a finger over his jawline in thought as he stares at me. “Think of it this way—you’re a PI who dug this all up quicker than shit, and yet a police force pushed and pressured by an extremely influential family wasn’t able to find two inexperienced teenagers? I find that hard to fucking believe, don’t you, Stu?”
“I think if I were in the Dillingers’ shoes and I knew exactly what was going down with Uncle Creep-Fest, I’d probably turn a blind eye too. I’d level those charges against the sisters to help protect my bullshit family reputation. I’d hope it would be a deterrent for them to come anywhere near the town of Greenwich—let alone Connecticut—because the farther away they are, the less chance they have of coming back as grown adults.”
“And the accusations made by grown adults hold so much more weight than those asserted by grieving kids.” I shake my head. “Shit.”
“You about summed it up with that one word.”
With my fingers fiddling with a pen, I hang my head and stare at my tie as I contemplate the believability of our theory. But I know it’s more than believable. I know that two grown men who have never even talked about this just both came to the same conclusion. That says a whole hell of a lot.
“A safeguard to protect your dirty family secret,” I murmur.
“I find it rather odd that when you search the Greenwich Gazette there isn’t one story about James Dillinger and his run-in with thieves. Not a single mention. His interviews mention his paralysis, how it doesn’t hold him back from creating his brilliant economic theories, but nothing about the tragedy that took his mobility or the person responsible for it. That’s more than odd.”
“Small towns. Big money. Bigger family name. Deal with the paralysis without any fanfare, press the charges so you can keep up the front, but with all that clout, tell the police department not to pursue the assailants. They were just confused kids still grieving the loss of their mother. We’ll forgive them. Blah, blah, blah.”
Is this Vaughn’s secret? Does she know about this, or did Samantha keep yet another thing from her sister? Did Samantha turn to the drugs to ease the pain of the abuse and to deal with the guilt of actually hurting a human being in order to save another?
With my head leaned back and eyes closed, I run through the scenario piece by piece, motive by motive, appreciating the moment Stuart gives me to deal with my thoughts.
I can hear his movements about my office: his shoes on the floor, the snap open of the cupboard, the glasses clinking, and the sound of the bottle being set down on top of the credenza.
“Thanks,” I murmur as I take the whiskey from him, mind still mulling over all of these maybes.
“Are you going to tell her?” he asks and takes a seat again.
“No.”
“No?” He sounds as surprised as I was by the word when it came out of my mouth.
I fall quiet again, the repercussions of telling her and not telling her a never-ending loop through my mind.
Does she know about her uncle? Was she there when Samantha pulled the trigger in self-defense? Is that why she’s so scared of Carter outing her publicly? Or did she leave in the middle of the night at her sister’s insistence without a clue as to what had happened? And if that is the case, then what exactly has her so spooked by Carter’s reference to her uncle?
“No,” I reiterate, the irony not lost on me that I’ve hung up on Vaughn in the past for saying the same word.
“No about knowing about this,” he says and waves to the papers all over the desk, “or no to telling her that you personally know the Dillingers?”
“Not sure, but what I do know is that I’m going to pay the motherfucker a visit myself.”
“You think that’s smart?”
“No. It’s going to take every ounce of restraint I have to not wrap my hands around his throat and finish the job Samantha started . . . but going there is something I need to do.” To protect Vaughn. To nullify anything Carter thinks he has over her. To feel like I can do something right as a man to help the woman I love.
“You need any backup, I’ll be glad to tag along.”
“Nah.” I shake my head. “I’ve got this.”
“And then what?”
“Well, I’m going to pay him a visit, threaten him within an inch of his goddamn life to drop the charges and to never come near Vaughn again. Then I’ll finally use the open invitation I get every year and show up at the Sunday family dinner of my old college roommate, Chance Dillinger. I’ll sit right across from his old, poor, paralyzed uncle named James and make sure he understands that I mean business. And if he doesn’t, then I’ll be sure to let his whole goddamn family—as well as most newspapers in the country—know about what exactly happened.”
“You’re a bastard, you know that?” Stuart asks with a chuckle that says he’d love to watch every minute of my confrontation.
“Not going to apologize for it either.” I flash a smile his way that I’m sure is loaded with deviance.
“Everything else you needed is right here on your desk,” he says, followed by the plop of a stack of papers.
“Thanks. I’ll give it a look later.” I take a long sip from my glass.
“Give me a heads-up when you decide to go.”
I laugh. “Why, so you can be ready to post my bail just in case?”
“Something like that.” He meets my gaze. “You good?”
“Yeah. Thanks for”—I wave a hand through the air—“everything.”
“Night, Lockhart.”
“Night.”
>
When the door shuts behind him, I shift in my seat so I can get a better look at my desk. The papers are still there, still inked with her name, and a silent rage runs through me. The same one that started when Vaughn came into my life and I knew there was very little I could do to protect her.
But I can do this.
I know the right thing to do is to tell Vaughn I know the truth about her past. The best for us as a couple is to confess that I snooped in order to protect her. Sure she’d be mad, but at least it would be me telling her. At least it would be me showing her I learned from my last mistake at the pool house when I tried to find out information to protect her better.
I sigh into my glass and drink the rest of the whiskey as I contemplate what to do next. Regardless of the decision, I know one thing is for certain: I’m going to protect what’s mine at all costs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Vaughn
“Can I see you tonight?”
My smile is automatic at the sound of his voice. My desire to be in Ryker’s arms or even sitting silently beside him is so intense that I just close my eyes and fight back the tears that burn there from sheer exhaustion.
“As much as I want to, I can’t.” I hate myself for even uttering the words.
“Why not?”
“I’m having trouble with a girl.” I flip the page on my pad of paper and glance down at the notes there. The complaints from a client about her unprofessionalism. How rude she was to him. And then below that is a note to call my new client Noah back—yet again—his nerves getting the best of him that he’s going to get caught.
“You are?”
“Yep.” The word comes out in a sigh.
“What’s wrong with your girl?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s good that it’s a long story. I like listening to your voice.”
And those simple words, ones that tell me I have someone in my life who cares about me, are so hard to accept, all the while so very incredible.
“She had dinner with someone last night and proceeded to insult him after getting drunk.”
“But you have a three-drink maximum,” he states. Leave it to the lawyer to have read my entire contract, even the small print.