Asking For It (2 page)

Multi-tasking was his middle name.

Of all his projects, however, the Wildwood venture he was going to present tonight to Godlfed Financial was the very best. Not because of its size, though the Sagebrush Valley site was the largest in land area Griffith had ever tackled. Not because of its beauty, though the untouched piece of real estate was something else. No, Griffith was most proud of the Wildwood project because of its utter ingenuity.

For three decades developers had been eyeing the site and salivating, but unable to do a thing with it. A hundred and seventy-five miles northeast of Los Angeles, in a pocket halfway between San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield, it was an empty expanse of sagebrush and tumbleweeds. The location was ideal for both long-range commuters and second homes. But nobody could build because there was no water.

That is, there hadn't been any water until Griffith had figured out a way to get some.

Genius. Yup, that's what he was. Griffith had been the only one smart enough to realize water could flow more than one way down a hill. The engineers and lawyers had taken care of the rest.

It was eleven-fifteen when, stopped for a red light on Olympic, Griffith's smug contentment tripped. Yeah, he was a genius, all right. A genius who'd forgotten to tell Mona about the lunch date that was to take place in less than an hour.

Griffith fished out his cell phone as the light turned green. Nearly plowing into a Navigator who'd run the red, Griffith hit the brakes while punching the speed dial number reserved for "latest girlfriend."

His experience with women was not deep, but certainly wide enough to know you gave a female more than an hour's notice she had to get dressed. He hissed when he got her voice mail message. "Sorry," he sang out anyway, after the beep. He was now past the intersection and weaving in and out of traffic. "Sorry, sorry, sorry. I should have called you earlier, but I got you that meeting. Lunch, remember? What? Oh. Mona. You're there?"

Griffith's initial elation he'd actually reached the woman faded fast under her blistering onslaught. It wasn't Griffith's lack of advance warning that bothered her, but his continued insistence on shoving food down her throat. She went on at some length regarding his utter lack of consideration regarding calories, a flaw that apparently outweighed his financial generosity and magazine connections. Griffith was not surprised when she ended the conversation by ending the relationship. Even he could read the signs. "No hard feelings?" Griffith asked, but she'd already hung up on him.

With a sigh, Griffith pressed the end button. Well, that was a new one. Usually a woman broke up with him because of his harried schedule and lack of attention. Often sheer exhaustion had him neglect making love to a lover — as he had the night before with Mona. Now, on top of these flaws, he apparently ate too many calories.

Griffith shrugged and dialed his magazine friend to cancel. Easy come, easy go. The magazine connection and a Prada handbag had won him Mona. Something of the same ilk would get him the next one. Money could do more than merely sing, Griffith had discovered.

He was starting to feel relieved, actually, about Mona's decampment when his cell phone rang. The number displayed revealed it was the other woman in his life.

He swore softly but sincerely as the muscles in his neck tensed. Expectation of pain. But experience told him it was better to take the call than leave it hanging over him. So drawing in a deep breath, he answered. "Hello, Mother."

Once he'd opened the floodgates, it was impossible to stop the deluge. A storm of complaints crashed over him, all concerning how he was running his life and how his bad choices adversely affected his maternal parent. Didn't he know how she worried?! He was working too hard. Not eating right. He couldn't possibly be happy. And when —
when
— was he going to find a decent woman?

For the love of —

His mother seemed to think Griffith was still the sniveling, ineffective child he'd left behind years ago. She thought he had no idea what he needed in life or how to go about getting it.

Never had Griffith's mother acknowledged his success, all he'd accomplished and owned. Instead she focused on her perception of deficiencies. None of these were deficiencies at all but simply — bizarre ideas of hers. A decent woman?

Worst of all, however, was that he let her get to him. Listening to her could cause a traitorous dissatisfaction to steal over him, as if he weren't perfectly happy with his life just the way it was. As if — as if — there were something wrong with him.

And maybe there was! He was thirty-five years old. Why did he let his mother, of all people, reduce him to questions and unhappiness?

Knots tightened across his shoulders. His head started to pound. And that was before she asked when he'd be coming to visit.

Griffith's eyes widened. "Oh, no, I don't think so, Mother." A searing pain shot through his temples as he turned up the ramp off Olympic Boulevard onto Avenue of the Stars. "No scheduled trips to New York. Nope. Not Thanksgiving. Impossible. And Christmas is when we're breaking ground on the Wildwood project in Sagebrush Valley. Uh uh." He slid the Porsche between a Corvette and a Prius and rolled his eyes when his mother complained he would probably never come to visit. If only he could arrange that!

He accelerated triumphantly past the Corvette. "After New Year's," he finally relented, putting it off as long as he decently could. "Goodbye, Mother," he said, before she could drag him down any further. He switched off the phone, and breathed out hard through his nose.

In a minute he'd get back to normal, the true Griffith Blaine: hard-ass entrepreneur, success. He was happy. He was fulfilled. He was perfectly satisfied. He was most definitely not lacking — in anything.

At his office in Century City, Griffith immediately jumped into helping Deirdre put together the PowerPoint presentation. Hard work made him feel back in control. He checked with the printer and reminded the caterer not to overcook the salmon dinner he'd ordered for his guests.

It was Deirdre who broke down. At three-thirty, Griffith took a look at her and knew she was at the end of her rope. His assistant was a good soldier, but Griffith knew better than to push a person past her limits. Her fine brown hair was escaping the fancy barrette into which it had been smoothed, there was an ink smudge on her cheek, and an exhausted, near-panicked look in her eyes.

He smiled and folded up his laptop. "I think we should both go home, take a break."

Deirdre, her own Armani suit badly crumpled, visibly relaxed. "You'll finish up the PowerPoint, then?" Her hazel eyes begged him.

"I'll finish it." Rather than breaking, Griffith thrived under pressure. But he did go home, his laptop riding shotgun. There'd be fewer interruptions at his condo and he could take a shower. Completely gone was the shadow of his earlier dissatisfaction.

At four-fifty, Griffith finished the PowerPoint presentation. It was golden. He emailed the presentation to himself at the office, ran into the shower, and was in the elevator going down to his car at five-twenty.

As he got out of the elevator and stepped into the concrete parking garage, thoroughly jazzed, his cell phone buzzed. Deirdre. Of course, there had to be some last-minute emergency, especially according to Deirdre.

The elevator and parking garage were both empty at this hour. The high-powered residents of the building did not start returning home from their jobs until well after seven. So Griffith had the place to himself as he let the phone buzz two more times, then juggled the things he was carrying in order to answer it. He'd just managed to extract the phone from his trouser pocket when a rude and heavy weight dropped onto his shoulders.

"What the — ?" Cell phone, car keys, and the suit jacket he'd been holding dropped to the ground as the same force spun Griffith around. Adrenaline shot through him, and that was before he found himself facing three thick-set men wearing stocking masks.

No way. No fucking way. Muggers. After ten years in L.A., he was experiencing his first personal attack — and at such an inconvenient moment!

If there hadn't been three of them, and such a large three, he might have fought, just on principle, but he was a practical man. He only had forty minutes to drive through rush-hour traffic to Century City. "I won't fight." He held up his hands. "Go ahead and take my wallet."

For answer, the largest of the three swung his fist into Griffith's gut. Griffith doubled over, registering pain and anger in equal measures. Goddammit, he'd offered them money. The golden medium. He didn't have time for senseless violence. Using his anger and the strength gained from ten hours spent at the gym every week — not to mention a dozen years of boxing lessons — Griffith came up swinging.

And connected. Not that it did him much good. The second largest of the three, unharmed, socked Griffith in the jaw. After that it became a free-for-all. Seething, Griffith did his best to do some damage, but it was three against one and his main goal was to escape the conflict altogether.
He had to get to Century City
.

It was when one of the hoodlums maneuvered Griffith into a stranglehold and started squeezing that Griffith realized these guys wanted more than his wallet. A lot more. He went from anger to terror and back again.

This could be random murderousness, or it could be — Well, okay, he'd made some enemies in his thirty-five years on earth. Fine, a lot of enemies. But that was par for the course. It was a dog-eat-dog world out there, and Griffith was a top dog. But the scrapping and brawling he did in the business world was...a
game
. It shouldn't lead to
this
.

With a strength now born of desperation, Griffith wrenched out of the stranglehold. But he was caught by another of the thugs, who pulled his left arm high behind his back, immobilizing him.

"Get the stick," this hoodlum ordered.

To Griffith's horror, another one of the masked men produced a hypodermic needle.

"Oh, no," Griffith muttered. He struggled again, but to no avail. The man with the needle flicked a finger against the hypo, then sent it through the material of Griffith's shirt and into his shoulder. "No," Griffith groaned, but he could feel the sting and then cool liquid shooting into him.

"Did you get him?"

"Yeah." The man with the syringe stood in front of Griffith. With his eyes grotesquely flattened by the stocking mask, he said, "That oughta do it."

"That ought to do what?" Griffith wanted to know, but the words didn't come out right. His tongue felt large in his mouth, his brain sluggish.

Simon, he thought. It was the one coherent idea left to him as his mind turned toward darkness. This had to be Simon Grolier's doing. Simon, Griffith's rival for the bank's money and who'd even text-messaged a warning.

But
I'm
supposed to win
. It was Griffith's last thought before he slumped, boneless, to the concrete floor.

CHAPTER TWO

She needed one more body.

The idea chimed repeatedly in Kate Darby's head as she did her best to alleviate World War Three, which was currently breaking out in the dining hall. After ten years of running the summer camp above Sagebrush Valley, Kate knew World War Three was inevitable. Take fifty boys between the ages of nine and fourteen, tumble them together a few hundred miles from home, and watch mayhem ensue.

One more body would not have changed that.

"We use our words to solve problems, not our hands." Kate did her best to make her own words come out at less than screaming volume, but it wasn't easy as she attempted to separate a pair of nine-year-old hands from a ten-year-old neck, and this in the midst of that noisiest of camp meals, the first supper of the two-week session.

"But he called me a bastard!" screeched the nine-year-old, who looked daggers at his adversary even as Kate managed to remove his hands from the other boy's neck.

Kate's eyes widened. "That word is
completely
unacceptable at Camp Wild — "

"Only because you took my place in line!" shouted the ten-year-old.

"Your
mother
!"

"
Pendejo
!"

"Ah, now. That's
quite
enough." Kate was ready to knock the heads of the two together by now, but thanks to years of experience with high-strung young males, she was able to restrain herself. Besides, she believed they were actually good kids, beneath the present bluster. She always believed that. So she took a deep breath instead of committing assault. A strand of blond hair puffed up from her forehead as she let the breath out.

"Boys, boys," she soothed, then pointed to the strangler. "I'm going to have a little chat with you first." She turned to the name-caller. "And then you."

"But I — "

"He's the one who — "

"Ah, ah, ah." Kate smiled and held up a hand. "I am what is called the 'last word' around here. Now, march."

The boys looked mutinous, but she'd perfected the Voice of Authority. They marched.

Kate led Strangler to the side of the dining hall, now filled with fifty excited, shouting males and a handful of far more sober counselors. Calmly she explained to Strangler the ground rules, rules she'd honed over the ten years she'd been running the place. No matter what their home lives were like, at Camp Wild Hills there was respect, self-esteem, and safety.