Secrets and Seduction: 5 Romance Novels (43 page)
Paul clasped his good hand. “It’s good to hear it now and again.”
“How’s Roger?”
Paul’s smile dimmed and his blue eyes darkened. “He’s holding up with Bryce and Sean’s support. They’ve helped both of us. Good friends are as important as little brothers.”
“I know that now. Would you do me a favor?
“Anything.”
It was cowardly, but he was afraid Gabrielle might refuse his call. “Would you call Gabrielle and tell her I’m awake?”
Paul frowned, looking from the phone on the nightstand to Christian. “Sure.”
Christian squeezed his brother’s hand. “Don’t worry about me, bro. But I’m glad you were here.”
• • •
Christian stared out the hospital window at the first blue, cloudless sky he’d seen in months. His head was finally clear. There was only one thing missing now.
A sound at the door made him turn his head. His breath caught at the sight of Gabrielle dressed in a sleeveless blood red sweater and blue jeans. Even with her somber expression, he thought she was beautiful. His heart thundered in his chest. She’d come.
Her blue eyes were wary, yet concerned. “Paul called to tell me you were awake.”
“Yeah.” He wished she’d come closer. Her wariness hurt.
“It’s my fault.”
“What is?”
“Your coma. I didn’t tell them about your … condition. It wasn’t my place to say anything. At the time, I didn’t think it mattered.”
Something tightened in his chest. She’d stayed away because she’d thought he’d blame her. Again. He needed to apologize for hurting her. He took a deep breath and forged ahead. “It was my fault you didn’t feel you could talk about it. I was an ass when I yelled at you. I hated having a secret like this, and being ashamed of it.”
“Me, too. I think we’ve both been outed.” She cocked her head. “I think you have some latent psychic ability. How do you feel about that?”
Blue eyes met blue. “I want to be normal, in every way.”
“Me, too.” There was so much yearning in her voice. An echo of a lifetime of pain and rejection for something she could not change. “I lost my job. My boss wanted me to tell him why you were at Crittenden, but I refused.”
Something else to feel guilty about. “Barrett and Ziko Architectural needs a new assistant. You’d be an asset with your knowledge of construction.”
“I wanted to be an architect, but I threw away my chance because a man rejected me. I was hurt for a long time after that.”
Christian knew just how she felt. “I don’t know if I can trust again, after Jeremy and Brittany.”
“I know how you feel.”
“You’ve always known and it’s not because you’re clairvoyant. I sensed the hurt in you.”
“I sensed it in you too. It was like looking in the mirror. When’s your birthday,” she asked suddenly.
“June fourteenth.”
She nodded as though she’d expected that answer. “Mine too. Gemini, the twins.”
“Figurative, not literal, though. Two halves of the same whole. I knew it. If we could start again … ”
She shook her head. “No.”
Disappointment tightened his chest. He deserved it after the way he’d treated her.
Gabrielle came to his bedside. “No. Let’s not start over. Let’s go forward from here.” She held out her hand.
Christian smiled and laid his good hand in hers. “Yes.”
A vision filled his mind.
Gabrielle sat in a wooden rocking chair with her nightgown unbuttoned and one engorged breast exposed. She took the baby Christian handed her and the black-haired infant greedily latched onto her nipple and began to suckle. She brushed the silky head, a silver wedding ring glinting on her left hand as it moved. She looked up with love in her blue eyes to where he stood beside her chair. His left hand rose to cup her cheek, his own wedding ring catching the light.
Gabrielle smiled. “The future looks good.”
Shay Lacy, author of
Touchpoint
and
Hero Needed
Avon, Massachusetts
This edition published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
Copyright © 2013 by Shay Lacy
ISBN 10: 1-4405-6211-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6211-2
eISBN 10: 1-4405-6212-1
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6212-9
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © 123rf.com; istockphoto.com/jhorrocks
Thanks to the lawyers I know who love practicing law: Jillian Chantal and Elizabeth Vaughan.
Thanks to Maumee Valley RWA, for monthly goal setting, to the B-I-C group for online accountability and my fellow Panera Prison inmates, who take me away from housework to write. Special thanks to Ray Wenck, my critique partner, who spouts sense, and to my friends Constance Phillips and Jenna Rutland, who accompany me on my journeys both literal and imaginative. As always, my thanks to my husband, who encourages me to do what I love.
Prologue
Who sent this?
Bryce Gannon wondered, as he turned over the thick brown padded envelope marked CONFIDENTIAL looking for the return address. But the criminal defense attorney found no clue. Did it contain something for a case? He worked at the tight seal with his letter opener, but just as his curiosity was about to be appeased his phone rang. With one hand he reached for it, his gaze shifting away from the envelope.
Boom.
The envelope exploded, shooting white powder into the air, just missing Bryce’s face. He jerked, dropping the envelope, which poofed another small cloud of white. What the hell … ? He inhaled and choked on the dust.
A letter bomb.
From the outer office he heard a woman’s frightened scream. His desk phone continued to shrill for his attention.
God, a bomb. He coughed, trying to wave away the white mist, until his brain finally kicked in.
Get up, you fool. Get away from this crap.
Ramming his chair back from his desk, he sprang clear of the cloud. But he continued to cough. His right hand was covered with white and tingled from the explosion’s percussion. The powder, whatever it was, blended into his stark white shirt.
“Bryce!” his office manager Sharron Rudgate shrieked from the doorway, “Are you hurt?” Her eyes were wild.
“Call nine-one-one,” he managed, although it took all his breath to get those four syllables out. He couldn’t seem to draw enough air into his lungs.
Sharron shouted his message into the hall before stepping towards him, her hand outstretched. He waved her back. He didn’t want anyone else inhaling this crap. A young researcher appeared behind Sharron, her face white as she stared at him.
There was an awful taste in his mouth, more bitter than chemical. He couldn’t seem to clear his throat. God, was it poison?
“Bryce, how much of that did you breathe in?” The usually unruffled Sharron sounded nearly hysterical. “What is it?”
Bryce couldn’t answer either question. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs screamed for air. His bronchial tubes spasmed painfully. His breath whistled as he drew it in. He tore at his silk tie, undoing the knot, and yanked at the button of his linen shirt collar so hard the button snapped off. But it didn’t help. He clutched his throat with one hand and his chest with the other. His lungs were on fire.
His knees buckled, dumping him to the plush carpet.
Jesus, he was going to die.
“Bryce!” Sharron screamed. “Bryce, oh my God!”
Bryce had no breath to speak. There were more frightened faces in the doorway standing at a safe distance listening to the sound of his tortured breathing. His staff, his office, his legal practice. The trappings of his success.
He saw his life pass before his eyes and felt deeply disappointed. He’d never been in love, never married, and never had children. He’d gotten criminals off on technicalities to roam free to hurt more people. He’d accepted large amounts of money from them, like the check with lots of zeroes on it he got today from accused racketeer Adam Steele. It was dirty money, guilty money —
blood
money. Thirty pieces of silver to betray himself and the law he loved. He’d had so much promise coming out of law school … and
this
was what his life amounted to. He knelt on the thick carpet like a supplicant, pleading for his miserable life.
He didn’t think he’d be cashing that check.
Suffocating hurt. He’d scream at the pain if he could, but he couldn’t. His heart pounded in his ears, laboring hard. Black spots danced before his eyes. His friends needed him. It was too bad Bryce would fail them at the end. He couldn’t even pass on any messages to them. Dammit, he wanted to live. As his strength faded he sank to the carpet.
The world spun away with his regrets.
Bryce Gannon should have been lying on a slab in the morgue. Instead, a ventilator kept the comatose defense attorney breathing, the thump and whoosh of the mechanical bellows and the monitoring equipment’s rhythmic beep the only sounds in his suburban Detroit ICU room. He resembled a corpse except for the forced rise and fall of his bare chest and the bluish cast to his skin that marked his respiratory system’s distress.
On the other side of the ICU glass, Ciara Alafita felt like a ghoulish voyeur. From what she’d heard of the impassive Gannon, she thought he’d hate this exposure and vulnerability. Well, as low as his blood pressure was, he might not yet survive whoever had tried to kill him so he could be embarrassed by his current condition.
She asked the man beside her, “Have the police found out who sent Gannon the letter bomb yet?”
Michigan State Attorney General Lawrence Baisden shook his head, his eyes detailing the scene inside the room. “I expect a report shortly.” He was in his early fifties, tall, with a commanding presence.
“Ricin is a bio-terrorist poison. Why would a terrorist choose Gannon as his target? He defends criminals like them.” Ciara had wondered why they’d driven an hour and a half from the state capital in Lansing to see Gannon in the hospital. She’d also wondered why the top man at the Attorney General’s office had pulled her out of her department to accompany him.
“I don’t think it was a terrorist attack,” Baisden said. “I wonder if it’s fallout from that mess with his friends last month.” He nodded to the black-haired man who sat in a chair beside Gannon’s bed.
Ciara recognized Paul Ziko, one of those friends, from the news. “But the real criminal confessed. Why would anybody target Gannon instead of him? Gannon defended the innocent party.”
“Were the rest of Gannon’s friends innocent? You must have seen the news, Ciara. Didn’t you wonder why more people weren’t arrested? I did. Maybe the victims’ families did too.”
Startled, Ciara turned away from the view of the man in the bed. “Are you suggesting a cover-up? One that Gannon engineered?”
Baisden’s brown eyes pierced her. “I’m suggesting Gannon’s so good at getting people out of legal jams that mobster Adam Steele hired him. I question Gannon’s associations and I don’t like the conclusions I’m drawing.”
Ciara sucked in her breath in surprise and lowered her voice. “This is about Gannon being asked to run for judge, isn’t it?”
Baisden nodded. “If he has poor judgment, or worse, I want to know about it now. I don’t want someone corrupt on my team.”