Truth and Justice

by Fern Michaels

  Books by Fern Michaels

  Fearless

  Spirit of the Season

  Deep Harbor

  Fate & Fortune

  Sweet Vengeance

  Holly and Ivy

  Fancy Dancer

  No Safe Secret

  Wishes for Christmas

  About Face

  Perfect Match

  A Family Affair

  Forget Me Not

  The Blossom Sisters

  Balancing Act

  Tuesday’s Child

  Betrayal

  Southern Comfort

  To Taste the Wine

  Sins of the Flesh

  Sins of Omission

  Return to Sender

  Mr. and Miss

  Anonymous

  Up Close and Personal

  Fool Me Once

  Picture Perfect

  The Future Scrolls

  Kentucky Sunrise

  Kentucky Heat

  Kentucky Rich

  Plain Jane

  Charming Lily

  What You Wish For

  The Guest List

  Listen to Your Heart

  Celebration

  Yesterday

  Finders Keepers

  Annie’s Rainbow

  Sara’s Song

  Vegas Sunrise

  Vegas Heat

  Vegas Rich

  Whitefire

  Wish List

  Dear Emily

  Christmas at

  Timberwoods

  The Sisterhood

  Novels:

  Truth and Justice

  Cut and Run

  Safe and Sound

  Need to Know

  Crash and Burn

  Point Blank

  In Plain Sight

  Eyes Only

  Kiss and Tell

  Blindsided

  Gotcha!

  Home Free

  Déjà Vu

  Cross Roads

  Game Over

  Deadly Deals

  Vanishing Act

  Razor Sharp

  Under the Radar

  Final Justice

  Collateral Damage

  Fast Track

  Hokus Pokus

  Hide and Seek

  Free Fall

  Lethal Justice

  Sweet Revenge

  The Jury

  Vendetta

  Payback

  Weekend Warriors

  The Men of the

  Sisterhood Novels:

  Hot Shot

  Truth or Dare

  High Stakes

  Fast and Loose

  Double Down

  The Godmothers

  Series:

  Far and Away

  Classified

  Breaking News

  Deadline

  Late Edition

  Exclusive

  The Scoop

  E-Book Exclusives:

  Desperate Measures

  Seasons of Her Life

  To Have and To Hold

  Serendipity

  Captive Innocence

  Captive Embraces

  Captive Passions

  Captive Secrets

  Captive Splendors

  Cinders to Satin

  For All Their Lives

  Texas Heat

  Texas Rich

  Texas Fury

  Texas Sunrise

  Anthologies:

  Home Sweet Home

  A Snowy Little

  Christmas

  Coming Home for

  Christmas

  A Season to Celebrate

  Mistletoe Magic

  Winter Wishes

  The Most Wonderful

  Time

  When the Snow Falls

  Secret Santa

  A Winter Wonderland

  I’ll Be Home for

  Christmas

  Making Spirits Bright

  Holiday Magic

  Snow Angels

  Silver Bells

  Comfort and Joy

  Sugar and Spice

  Let It Snow

  A Gift of Joy

  Five Golden Rings

  Deck the Halls

  Jingle All the Way

  FERN MICHAELS

  TRUTH AND JUSTICE

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CUT AND RUN

  HOME SWEET HOME

  FEARLESS

  DEEP HARBOR

  ZEBRA BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 by Fern Michaels

  Fern Michaels is a registered trademark of KAP 5, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Zebra and the Z logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4201-4606-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4201-4607-3 (eBook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4201-4607-6 (eBook)

  I would like to dedicate this book to the real Jeff

  Josell and the real Scott “Bones” Kimball.

  It was fun watching you guys grow up and become

  the parents you are today. Thanks for the memories.

  Mike’s Mom

  Prologue

  “I pronounce you man and wife! You may now kiss the bride, Major Nolan,” Pastor Leonard Bryant said, smiling from ear to ear.

  Major Andrew—Andy to his friends—Nolan, planted a lip-lock on his new bride, making the pastor blush a rosy red and clear his throat to move things along. After all, he did have three other couples waiting to enter into the state of marital bliss.

  Pastor Leonard Bryant cleared his throat a second time while the three waiting couples stomped their feet as they hooted and hollered their congratulations to the newlyweds. It was obvious to the pastor that they didn’t mind waiting a little longer.

  Breathless and breathing hard, the just-married couple broke apart and ran from the small chapel, shouting their thanks over their shoulders.

  “We’re down to forty-seven and a half hours until this honeymoon is ove
r, Mrs. Nolan. How do you want to spend it? Sightseeing in my new truck, eating breakfast, or hitting the sack?” Andy shouted exuberantly.

  The new bride, Bella Ames Nolan, tilted her head to the side. God, she loved this guy standing next to her with his arm around her shoulders in an I-am-never-going-to-let-you-go hold. He was better looking than any movie star she’d seen on the big screen. He was funny, witty, and charming, and did this thing with his tongue in her ear that drove her absolutely nuts. And most of all, he loved her. Her. He had told her how he loved her from the very first time they met, and her love for him had only grown stronger over the three years they had been seeing each other: FaceTiming while he was away and in person on the occasional leave.

  “How about this? We climb into your new truck and drive someplace for a breakfast we do not want but pretend to eat; then we spend the rest of our forty-eight hours in bed. That’s a trifecta if I ever heard one. Will that work for you, Major Nolan?”

  “It absolutely will, Mrs. Nolan, unless you’d like to help me christen the bed in the back of the truck. You know, every truck has what they call a bed.”

  Her new husband’s expression was so hopeful, so earnest, Bella burst out laughing, and quipped, “I thought you would never ask.” Like she really wanted to spend even one second of their forty-eight-hour honeymoon in the bed of a pickup truck with no blanket. Anything for Andy even if her ass was black-and-blue for a month. She consoled herself with the thought that no one was going to see her ass unless she took some selfies to send to Andy once he landed wherever he was scheduled to be deployed. If she did do that, would it be considered porn? She decided that yes, it probably would be. Well then, no selfies.

  “Hop in, Mrs. Nolan. We need to find a secluded place to christen this here fine vehicle. Tell me the truth, Bella, did you ever see a better-looking truck?”

  In all the time she’d known Andy, she had never heard such excitement in regard to herself in his voice. Say the word truck and Andy was over the moon.

  Bella forced herself to smile. She hated trucks. What she hated even more was the $65,000 in payments that went with “this here fine vehicle.” Payments she would be making once Andy deployed. She smiled again as she tried not to think about her soon-to-be-bruised rear end.

  And christening the truck was exactly what they did after pulling into an abandoned strip mall whose parking lot was secluded and in back of the tight strip of nine stores. The christening lasted eleven and a half minutes, two of which were used up with Bella tangling up the strings of her bikini panty. In the end, Andy just ripped them apart, and that was the end of that.

  To say the christening was even close to pleasant would be an outright lie. Bella didn’t even bother to pretend. Andy was so engrossed in the horsepower of his brand-new truck, a wedding present to himself, that he didn’t even notice Bella pouting in the passenger seat as she stared out the window at the traffic and whatever scenery she could home in on.

  The remainder of the forty-eight hours passed in a blur for Bella. She sobbed and hiccupped against Andy’s bare chest when he said it was time for them to shower and dress because he had exactly thirty-seven minutes left on his leave. Bella cried even harder, and Andy literally had to pry her arms from around his shoulders. He beelined for the bathroom and took the shortest shower in history.

  In what seemed like the blink of an eye, he was dressed and ready to go when the room phone rang. It was the desk clerk, telling Andy that his ride was waiting in the lobby.

  Bella sat up in bed, stunned at what was going on. She hadn’t showered. There was no way she could get dressed because she reeked of sex. What that meant was that Major Andy Nolan was going to walk out the door, and she wouldn’t see him again until . . . whenever. No, no, this was all wrong. The goodbye at the end of her honeymoon was not supposed to be like this.

  Bella could feel the anger start to build in her gut. She sat up, the sheet up to her chin. “Is this where you say, great honeymoon, all forty-eight hours of it, and hey, babe, I’ll see you when I see you?”

  Andy laughed, his head bobbing up and down. “See! I told you you would get it. You really are a good little soldier. I’m proud of you. The answer is yeah, pretty much.” He ran over to the bed, his eyes on his watch. He kissed her on the nose before running out of the room. He had two minutes to make it to the lobby and his ride or they would leave without him. He decided on the stairs because he didn’t want anyone to see the tears in his eyes. He felt like a jerk, a real heel for the way he’d exited the hotel room and left his new bride crying her eyes out. He knew that was the only way to play it or he would have lost it and cried right along with her and missed his ride. Discipline.

  Andy barreled through the revolving door right on the heels of Colonel Paul Montrose and hopped into the Jeep in front of the hotel. His honeymoon was over. Now he had a war to fight.

  Back inside the hotel room, Mrs. Bella Nolan stared at the door until she felt like she was going cross-eyed.

  Now what was she supposed to do?

  Pitching a hissy fit sounded good, but that took a lot of energy, energy she was totally lacking.

  Shower? Wash away all traces of Andy? I can’t do that, she thought, sobbing.

  Roll over and go to sleep. The room is paid through tomorrow.

  The Nolan honeymoon was officially over.

  Chapter 1

  It was three weeks since the horrendous rain. Andy’s truck was still sitting in the now-dry parking lot because she didn’t have the money to have it towed anywhere. He didn’t have towing or truck replacement on his insurance. In fact, he had skimped wherever he could to save money. As far as she was concerned, the finance company could come and take the damn thing. She wasn’t paying another red cent on that monster Andy loved and adored. She’d written him the day the rain stopped, but of course there was no response, something she found not only strange but even weird considering how Andy loved the Ram 2500.

  He hadn’t even acknowledged the e-mail that said she was filing for divorce.

  Bella parked her Honda Civic, which was several spaces away from her two-year-old Nissan Sentra, in the same parking space she’d been issued when she had rented the apartment. The Nissan had been brand-spanking-new when she bought it. By the time the claims adjuster had finished his work, she had enough to buy the Civic with only a $66-a-month car payment. The Civic was also better on gas. The seventy-eight–year-old woman who had sold it to her swore that the 20,000-mile reading on the odometer was true and accurate, and the reason she was selling it was because she was going to move into an assisted living village and didn’t need a car. Bella had bought it on the spot and never regretted it for a second.

  Bella stepped out of the elevator and made her way down the hall to her apartment. She didn’t run these days the way she had before. Before as in, before hiring Mitchell Jones. She played with the three apartment keys in her hand before she inserted the dead-bolt key into the lock.

  Bella tossed the mail on the little bistro table in the kitchen without looking at it. What was the point? Bills, bills, bills. She could look at them anytime. Her theory was that if she opened them, she had to pay them. If she ignored them, then they didn’t exist until she was ready to open and pay them.

  Just the other day, she’d separated the mail into two piles. Her pile was on the left and Andy’s was on the right. When she moved next week, her plan was to leave Andy’s mail right where it was. Let the new tenant forward it or take it back to the post office. She grimaced when she saw the bill from Mitchell Jones in the stack of mail she’d carried in. It bothered her that she owed him money, but he’d said he would work with her and take whatever she could pay over time as she got paid. To date, she had paid him the munificent sum of $60.

  Next week.

  Everything was next week, when she was moving into a smaller one-bedroom apartment in the next complex down the road. She’d start her new part-time job next week. She was going to be a cashier four hours a night
, six nights a week at a health-food store, earning $15 an hour plus a forty percent discount on anything she wanted to buy. It was time to start eating healthy and living a healthier lifestyle. Maybe she would meet some nice people and start to get a life for herself. She wished she could get the four years she’d devoted to Andy back, but that was impossible. The best years of her young life. How foolish she’d been to be so devoted to Andy that she took nothing in return but a ring on her finger and a pile of bills. Then again, she’d fallen in love.

  Right now, right this minute, she was convinced the marriage hadn’t stood a chance from the get-go. Maybe if Andy was a nine-to-five, work-at-Home-Depot kind of guy, it might have stood a chance.

  Bella warned herself to turn off that kind of thinking by telling herself that you can’t unring the bell. When she’d told her boss and some of the people that she worked with at the small graphic design company that she was filing for divorce, they had started to distance themselves from her, asking her how could she do that when Andy was fighting for his country, and calling her a spoiled brat for thinking only of herself and not what Andy was going through. It was cruel and inhuman what she was doing, they said. When she ran crying to Mitchell Jones to tell him, he’d just looked at her and lowered his eyes. It was clear he was of the same opinion as her employer and her coworkers, but lawyer that he was, he wasn’t going to say anything. And besides, she was his client, and it was not his place to judge. She’d come to him seeking help, and he was providing said help. End of his story. That very night, she had a dozen résumés updated and ready to mail. So far, she had only one scheduled interview on the horizon.

  Bella poured herself a glass of wine. No more running to the computer the moment she was inside. Those days were long gone. She kicked off her shoes, made her way to the sofa, and flopped down. She turned on the six o’clock news and settled down to find out what had gone on in the world while she labored all day at work.