Forbidden Attraction: A Contemporary Romance Box Set

by K. C. Crowne

  “We’re going to talk to Josh Michaels,” he said, pulling away from the curb.

  “We’re just going to talk to him?”

  Paul glanced at me. “We don’t really have anything on him. Nobody saw him go into your building. He was just on your block, a place he’s at perfect liberty to be. The only crime he’s associated with right now is possibly breaking into your girlfriend’s apartment.”

  “Okay, so we’re going to talk to Josh Michaels. But what can we do, if we don’t have enough on him to involve the police?”

  “We can put the screws to him a bit,” Paul said. “Just seeing you might shock him into saying more than he means to. I’ll have a recording device on, and if we get him to confess anything, then you go to the cops.”

  “This seems like a sketchy plan.”

  “Do you have a better one?”

  “I’ve got nothing.”

  “We do my plan, then,” Paul said.

  We rode the rest of the way in silence, and I had plenty of time to think about what I might say. The truth was that, preponderance of evidence or not, I did believe that Josh Michaels was involved in both crimes. I deeply regretted trying to convince Jenna of his innocence. I had been blind not to think that there could be a connection, that someone so clearly malevolent could be involved in an underground crime organization. And I’d ignored the biggest piece of evidence of all—the desk clerk in Jenna’s building had told her that the intruder had been the son of one of her clients. I had thought at the time that the woman must have been wrong, or that two different people had visited Jenna’s apartment that day.

  What if there had been only one invader? Joshua Michaels had tried to assault Jenna after she’d redesigned his home. He could have also broken into her apartment. And maybe he’d kidnapped Tess.

  What if he was behind everything?

  Paul pulled the car to a stop outside a distinguished apartment building. I started to get out.

  “No,” he said. “Wait.”

  “Wait? For what?”

  “He’s going to come out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “PI, remember? I’ve been watching him. He goes to the coffee shop around the corner at this time every day.”

  “So we’re going to talk to him outside?” That seemed like a bad idea. “Won’t people see us?”

  “We want people to see us,” Paul said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he won’t do anything drastic or violent,” he replied. “We’ll be able to control the tone of the conversation by having it in public. Not to mention that if we go inside, we’re on his turf. We don’t know what he’s got in there. He might have a gun. We don’t want to mess with that.”

  I nodded. I had to admit, it made sense. I needed to give Paul a little more credit. This wasn’t his first rodeo, and he clearly knew how to handle a confrontation like the one we were about to have.

  And he was right about Josh’s schedule. We had only been waiting a few moments when a man in his early thirties emerged. He had thinning brown hair and a face like a rat. “That’s him,” Paul said. “Go.”

  I got out of the car, my heart pounding, and followed Paul up onto the pavement.

  “Joshua Michaels?” Paul said, stepping into Josh’s path.

  Josh looked from Paul to me. I waited, hoping to see a flash of recognition or fear, but he gave nothing away. “Yeah?”

  “We’re here to give you one chance,” Paul said. His voice was low and menacing, like nothing I’d ever heard from him before. “One chance to come clean with us before we go to the cops with everything we know. We can all still walk away from this.”

  “What the—who are you?” Josh asked.

  “You know who I am,” I said, stepping in close. Paul moved back a little, allowing me to take the lead. I wondered distantly whether he thought I had a better chance at spooking Josh into revealing something than he did, or if he was just giving me the opportunity to take out some of my anger. Either way, I was going to take advantage. I got in Josh’s face and backed him up against the wall of his building. He was a squirrelly little guy, and I could see the fear in his eyes. He was bigger than Jenna, and I could understand why she would have been intimidated by him. But he had nothing on me.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his voice almost a whine. “I don’t know who you are. I’ve never met you before in my life.”

  “Maybe you haven’t met me,” I agreed. “But you’ve met people I love, haven’t you?”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  Anger spiked through me, and I shoved him back against the brick of his building hard and heard his teeth clack together. “Tell me where she is, asshole! I know you were at my apartment the night she was kidnapped.”

  “Where who is? Man, I’ve never been to your apartment1 I don’t know who you are!”

  It was all I could do to keep from punching him, and that was an urge I wouldn’t be able to control much longer. “Tell me,” I said, “or you’ll regret it.”

  “Sixty-fourth street,” Paul interjected. “A couple of nights back. You were seen there.”

  “I...I have a guy there. A buyer. I was selling him weed, okay?”

  A door slammed. I glanced up. Standing on the concrete steps leading up to Josh’s apartment and looking down on the scene, absolute shock written on his face, was Eric.

  “Paul!” I yelled. “Grab him!”

  Paul leapt into action. It was only when he’d corralled Eric and had him pressed against the wall beside Josh that I remembered he knew who Eric was. He’d been watching him for me for weeks. Paul, more than anybody else, had reason to understand the doubts I’d been having about my best friend.

  “Why do you keep attacking me?” Eric asked, squirming.

  “Why do you keep showing up everywhere?”

  “I didn’t know you’d be here,” he pouted.

  That was actually a decent point, since I hadn’t known I’d be here myself until recently, but I wasn’t prepared to give in. “What are you doing with him?” I asked, giving Josh a shake.

  “Let me go,” Josh whined. I ignored him.

  “We have business, that’s all,” Eric said, looking anywhere but at me. “It’s got nothing to do with you, Noah.”

  “Is it something to do with this?” I fished the business card I’d gotten from Kepler out of my pocket and slapped it hard against the brick between Eric and Josh. My hand would hurt later from the force of that slap, I thought, but so much rage and adrenaline was coursing through me right now I couldn’t even feel it.

  “Hey—where did you get that?” Josh asked, frowning.

  “What do you mean, where did I get it? Your boss gave it to me!”

  “Man, what boss? I don’t have a job,” he defended. “That card belongs to my dad.”

  It was as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over me. The flame of my rage was quenched, and in its place, disorientation sprang up. “Your dad?”

  “Liam Michaels,” he said. “His initials are on it, right?”

  Liam Michaels.

  LM.

  Eric was looking from Josh to me, his face a study in confusion. “What’s going on? Why do you have Josh’s dad’s business card? He’s not a good dude, Noah. You shouldn’t be getting involved with him.”

  “Hey,” Josh said.

  Eric shrugged. “Just the truth, man. I’m not letting my buddy go into business with someone who’s going to screw him over.”

  “How is he your buddy when he’s got you up against a wall like this? He doesn’t seem to like you at all.”

  “You had his card,” I interrupted, holding the blue card in Eric’s face. “It was in your pocket when you came into my office that day and you claimed not to know anything about it. Now you’re telling me he’s not a good guy. Are you working with him?”

  “No,” Eric said. “Definitely not.”

  “Then what? Why’d you have the card?”
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  Eric sighed. “Josh gave it to me,” he said. “He’d written his phone number on it. Did you notice that?”

  “No,” I admitted, flipping the card over.

  “Well, he did,” Eric said. “He handed me the card because it was what he had, and he wanted to give me his number. It had nothing to do with his father.”

  “Why was he giving you his number?” I tightened my hands on Josh’s collar. I still didn’t trust a word out of this guy’s mouth.

  “It’s personal,” Eric hedged.

  “Make it un-personal.”

  He closed his eyes. “I was looking for money, all right? I was trying to get a loan.”

  “So you could buy more drugs.”

  “Not just drugs.” He looked up at me imploringly. “I need money to live, Noah. I told you, my access to my trust funds was cut off.”

  “Which happened because you’re high all the time, and if you cleaned yourself up you could get it back. Right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “So you wanted to borrow money because you wanted to keep the party going. You hit me up but got nothing, and you were also trying to get money from your buddy Josh. Is that about the size of it?”

  Eric nodded reluctantly.

  “And you lied to me and told me the card had been given to you by a stranger on the street. Why?”

  “I was embarrassed,” he admitted. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I would be embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.”

  “I know,” he replied, looking down. “I’m sorry, man, I am.”

  “Don’t apologize to me. You need to get your act together.” It was a relief to know that my best friend wasn’t involved in the kidnapping of my daughter. I hadn’t realized how much that betrayal had been weighing on me until now, when it was alleviated. But the fact that Eric had made such a mess of his life that I had confused him for a member of the Mob was frightening.

  “Let him go,” I said to Paul, who complied.

  “What about me?” Josh asked.

  “You’re going to tell me where I can find your father,” I said.

  “Man, I don’t know—”

  I slammed him so hard against the wall that his teeth rattled. “That man kidnapped my daughter,” I said through clenched teeth. “Now I’ve got his son in my hands. Do you really think there’s anything I won’t do to get her back?”

  “Okay,” Josh said, looking frightened. “Okay. I know an address where he might be. Let me go and I’ll write it down for you.”

  “No, you tell my friend and he’ll write it down.”

  Paul wrote the address Josh rattled off to us in a little notepad. Only then did I release him. “I know where you live,” I told him, my finger in his face. “Remember that. I can always find you again.”

  “I never did anything to you,” he said. “I don’t know what my father has his hands in, but it wasn’t me. I swear.”

  He’d tried to hurt Jenna before any of this had started. That alone was enough to make me want to break his nose. But I didn’t have the time for that luxury. “Come on,” I said to Paul, heading back to the car. “We’ll go there now.”

  “We’ve got enough to involve the cops at this point,” Paul said.

  “Okay,” I agreed. There couldn’t possibly be a safer place to make this call than from inside a PI’s car. “I’ll call them. You drive.”

  Chapter 31

  Jenna

  It was hard to keep track of time reliably, stuck in the warehouse, but eventually the seams around the metal walls darkened and I knew night had fallen.

  Tess crawled into my arms and slept with her head on my shoulder, looking much younger than she was. I wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. I sat awake all night, my back against the wall, smoothing her hair, untangling it gently, whispering things I knew she couldn’t hear. I didn’t sleep at all, and eventually the building’s seams began to lighten again.

  I had been here for a full day.

  Breakfast came a few hours after daylight. A man—it wasn’t MacReady or Strauss—brought in a tray. One apple. Two pieces of bread. One cheese singlet.

  “Eat up,” he said. “You two have got a big day ahead of you.”

  “What kind of day do we have ahead of us?” I asked, hoping my mocking tone was plain.

  He just laughed ominously and retreated.

  I gave Tess one of the pieces of bread and kept the other. I tried to give her the whole piece of cheese, but she insisted on ripping it in half and giving a piece to me. We had no means of cutting the apple, so we passed it back and forth, each taking a bite before passing it. I was still hungry when all the food was gone, but I was encouraged by the fact that they’d brought it. They were keeping us alive for something.

  For Noah. It had to be. Noah was the only thing Tess and I had in common. We’d both been taken to hurt him, and my kidnappers had said they wanted him to do something. I couldn’t imagine him refusing to do anything if it meant getting his daughter back.

  Tess signed something.

  What?

  F-i-n-d. Find.

  Find, I imitated.

  She nodded, then tried again. Daddy find us?

  My heart wrenched. It was the syntax of sign language, coupled with the fact that she had to compensate for my not being fluent, that made her sound so young. Knowing that didn’t make her sound any less achingly child-like. She was a terrified little girl, and she wanted her father.

  He find us, I said.

  She curled up against me and I resumed picking the tangles from her hair.

  Time seemed to crawl, but it was impossible to be sure how much time was actually passing. Inside the warehouse, I couldn’t track the sun’s movement across the sky or notice the shortening or elongating of shadows. The light didn’t even seem to increase in brightness. We were just there, and time was inscrutable.

  Occasionally, I noticed Tess’s body shaking as she cried silently. I tightened my grip on her. Okay, I signed, one of the few signs I could do one handed. Okay. Okay. Okay. Over and over, trying to reassure her. Maybe I was just trying to reassure myself.

  And as the day wore on, nothing changed. Nothing at all happened.

  So much time went by that when the door finally did open again, I thought at first that I must be imagining it. Maybe I’d drifted off to sleep at last and was dreaming.

  The man who stepped in was the same man who’d brought our breakfast. But he didn’t have a tray. He had a gun.

  I jumped to my feet, pulling Tess with me, jolting her out of sleep. She clung to my waist like a frightened animal.

  “Enough waiting,” the man announced. “We’ve given Clark plenty of time to respond to our demands. It’s time to show him we mean business.”

  So this was what he’d meant when he’d said we had a big day ahead of us. My muscles felt like noodles. “What do you want?”

  “One of you. Either one. You can decide.” He grinned. This was a game to him. He wanted to see what we’d do.

  “One of us for what?” I asked.

  “To send a message.” He cocked the gun. “To show Clark what’s going to happen to the other one if he keeps defying us.”

  I swallowed hard. I felt remarkably cold now that I knew what I had to do. The nausea and the feeling that I might cry were gone. “Me, then,” I said. “Take me.” I stepped out of Tess’s embrace and held up a hand to her, indicating that she should stay where she was. She stared at me, wild-eyed, confused and afraid.

  The man grabbed me by the arm, pulled me to him, and pressed his gun into my temple painfully. It was cold and hard and I understood this was it for me. There was no escape.

  Tess was hyperventilating and sobbing. I held out a hand to her, trying to indicate that she ought to stay where she was. Okay, I signed. Okay. Okay.

  “What are you doing with your hand?” the man asked, shaking me roughly. “Some kind of signal?”

  “Yes, it’s sign languag
e. Or did you not notice she’s deaf?”

  “Well, here’s a sign for Noah Clark,” he said. “He shouldn’t have tested our patience.”

  I closed my eyes.

  A gunshot rang out.

  For a moment that seemed to go on forever, I thought I was dead. Everything had slowed down. The pounding of my heart filled my ears as I waited for the pain and the darkness. Each inhale seemed precious. Miraculous. Magical.

  But I was still breathing.

  That gun had been right up against my head. I should not have been breathing. Was this death, then? I opened my eyes.

  Tess was staring at me, hands clapped to her mouth. No, I realized suddenly. She isn’t staring at me. She’s staring past me.

  Then I heard several more gunshots in quick succession. “Down here!” a voice shouted. “They’re in here! Go after them!”

  The barrel of the gun had disappeared from my temple. I ran back to Tess and flung my arms around her, pulling her down to the ground, covering her body with mine as the gunfire continued. She was gasping in terror. I couldn’t sign anything to her, not pressed against the ground as we were, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. How could I explain what was happening when I didn’t know myself?

  What I did know was that these men would kill us the moment they got a chance.

  What I knew was that we had been granted a reprieve, however temporary, and we needed to take advantage of it. We might not get a second chance.

  I looked over my shoulder. The man who had been menacing me was peering out into the hallway, clearly trying to get a handle on what was going on out there. He wasn’t watching us.

  I got to my feet and pulled Tess up with me. I pressed a finger to my lips and she nodded. Her face was tear streaked, but she looked determined, and I felt so proud of her I could hardly believe it.

  I crept up behind the man at the door, reaching back every few seconds to touch Tess’s shoulder and reassure myself that she was still behind me. She was so quiet that I needed those reassurances. When I was about a foot away from the man, I waved her back with my hand, then looked over my shoulder to see her retreating quickly.

  Here goes nothing.