“I should be, you know.” He didn’t let go of the breath he was holding. “I should be with both of you. But I can’t be. I know…he would have come and come again until one or all of you would have killed him.”
He knew that was what Royce had said he’d do. Daniel wanted to believe that his brother wouldn’t kill anyone, but he’d seen the look in his eye when he’d talked about Kasey. Getting out of his car, he walked to the gates and watched the planes take off. His friend at the counter gave him the flight number and a short nod.
“He’s gone. And I don’t expect him to return. Not for a long while anyway.” Daniel nodded at Jared and Conley and they started back toward town with Jared driving much too fast. “I’ll be at the office later if you want to talk.”
“Oh you can bet on that. But first, I have to hunt down my maybe future husband and give him a hard time about this.” Her laughter made him feel a little better. “Daniel?”
“Yes, love.” He was smiling then, feeling like he’d conquered the whole world. “What is it?”
“You do anything like this again, ever, and I will find you, cut your nuts off to your dick, and serve it to you with vegetables.” Then the line went dead.
Daniel put his phone on the seat beside him and took several deep breaths. Christ almighty, that was scarier than anything he’d ever heard before. He knew it was something that she’d try her best to carry out and thought that was what scared him the most.
Chapter 20
The trial. That’s all he could think about was
the trial
. He was being sued by not only the Hunter Corporation, a place he’d given years of his life too, but by seven woman that he couldn’t even begin to remember. Mike looked over at the paper again, the one that named all the females he’d supposedly abused and treated badly while in his employment. May Simpson.
She claimed that he had kept her from being promoted three times and had made her have sex with him in the locker room on several occasions. He’d had sex with every one of the women who had worked for him so that didn’t really narrow it down. Well, not all, he remembered suddenly. That bitch Kasey hadn’t. But this May person was saying that he’d forced her.
Mike had never “forced” anyone in his life. At least not after he’d gotten them where he’d wanted them. Grinning, he thought about that and then frowned.
That wouldn’t be considered force. No way. Yes, he did dangle some prize in front of them. A promotion, maybe some extra pay, but they should have known that he had no way of giving them that. It was their own stupidity that had gotten them there, not him forcing them.
He looked at the next name on the list of women. Gertrude Best. He vaguely remembered her. She’d been a pretty little thing. Just graduated from college somewhere and needed a job while she did some shit or another that would get her into someplace he didn’t give two shits about. She’d hurt him if he had the right girl. Punched him in the nose when he’d made love to her. She’d screamed something about rape for awhile until…he couldn’t rightly remember what had shut her up, but she’d not bothered him again.
The rest of the names meant just as little to him. There was one name on the list, the one that kept pounding at him every time he saw it. Kasey M. York, the girl form when he’d been fired.
He’d felt his blood pressure rise whenever she was mentioned or he thought about her. The fucking cunt had told them, his boss, some lies and now he had no job, no way of getting on, and now he was marked as well. He looked down at the bracelet on his ankle and cursed it again.
He couldn’t go twenty-five feet beyond his domicile, the judge, then that brother of Hunter’s, had told him—several times—not with that fucking lock on his leg. What fucking bullshit was that, he wanted to know? He couldn’t go to the bar down the street, couldn’t go to the corner drug store; hell, he couldn’t even go to the fucking mailbox without calling some prick and telling him where he was going. He did it too. He hated the way they’d made him feel when he’d not done it the one other time.
He’d been out there with his bills in his hand—another thing he was fucking pissed about, not having money to pay anything—and talking shit with his good friend that had just moved in next door…Benny something. The police had come around the corner like the place was a bank being robbed. Three cruisers pulled up in front of where he was standing with their guns pointed at him before he could even take a breath.
“Put your hands up and drop to your knees, now,” one of them shouted in his and Benny’s direction. “Now.”
Mike looked over at Benny, wondering what the hell he’d done, when one of the cops shot a bullet at them. Both him and Benny dropped right fucking down after that. When the police started up to the walkway, still all ready to drop someone, he glanced over at his buddy again and was surprised to see one of them cops helping him up off the ground. Before he could think he was going to be helped up too, he was being tackled like a common criminal.
“What the fuck are you doing, you stupid cock sucker?” He knew as soon as the cop on his back growled at him, he’d made a tactical error. Didn’t shut him up, but he knew that it should have. “Get the fuck off me, you son-of-a-bitch, or I’m going to sue your fucking ass.”
“You just try it, you stupid bastard, and let me show you how many bones I can break in your face before someone pulls me off you.” Mike had never been overly bright, he would admit that, but there was no reason for this guy to speak to him that way. Before he could make another, no doubt ignorant comment, there was a voice that he’d recognized from numerous phone conversations.
“I would shut up now if I were you, Mr. White. These guys aren’t your normal run of the mill officers. They work for me. Well, my brother, but they take orders from me.”
Curtis crouched down so that Mike could see him now. He had a thought that he’d never seen the guy in jeans before and thought stupidly that he looked as good in them as he did in a business suit. Mike started to say something, he wasn’t sure what, when Curtis simply said, “quiet.”
Suddenly, he was sitting up and the cops had moved away. Mike didn’t try to stand, somehow knowing that he’d be right back where he was in seconds, but he did lean back, trying to make like it was okay for him to sit in the dirt with his fucking mail lying all over his lap.
“What the hell do you want? I haven’t gone near your precious building,” he said to him. “I’ve been nowhere, if you want to know that truth. I’m sort of tethered here.”
Curtis laughed. “Yes, you are. And you’re damned lucky you can move about at all. If I had my way, you’d be in prison awaiting trial, not living out among humans as if you’re one of them.”
“Hey. That’s not right. You can’t talk to me like—” The hand across his face made his head snap back so hard that he heard his neck pop. He closed his mouth with a snap.
“You will shut the fuck up and listen to me. You’ll have this same treatment every time you so much as walk out the door beyond the twenty-five feet we had to give you. I don’t like you very much, White, and I hope that for your sake when you go to trial, you get a fucking fantastic lawyer because I’m going for the max on this.” Curtis stood up. “If I were you, I’d enjoy what I could of the outside world because when I’m through with you, you’ll never see the light of day again.”
That had been two weeks ago. And now here he was, the night before the trial. The police had been outside his apartment since the jury had been selected and he’d been with his dumb fuck lawyer once since then. He just knew that he was completely fucked.
The guy that had been assigned to him was Wilbert Fulton. What kind of person didn’t change their name so that they’d have to go their entire life called Wilbert was beyond him. He was scheduled to come and take off the bracelet and take him to court within the next hour. At least that was the plan he’d been told yesterday. Mike thought about his own plan.
He was going to get the hell out of here as soon as the stupid thing was off and he didn’t care how he did it or who he had to kill to make it happen. The gun Benny had given him last week was tucked right in the chair where he was sitting and the sucker was loaded too.
The knock at the door startled him. Wilbert was early, but it didn’t matter. Mike had been prepared for that too. He’d been ready to go since yesterday morning. His bag was packed, he had all the cash he could get to under the circumstances, and he had his shoes on. He wasn’t entirely sure they had to come off to take the fucking beeper off, but he was ready for that too with an extra pair of shoes in his bag. Getting a hard-on thinking about how this was going to make him a free man, Mike adjusted his cock as he walked to the door. It slammed open before he could get to it.
“Hello fuck-tard.” Suddenly, Mike found himself on the floor and a knee at his back. “We are taking precautions, so you lay here real quiet like and you won’t get hurt.”
“No,” he managed to squeak out before his arms felt as if they were being torn from the sockets. “You can’t…let me up and let me sit in the chair. There isn’t…what the fuck are you doing this for?”
“Chair, huh? Richey, go and check out what the little prick has hidden in the chair for us.” The man at his back jerked his head around by his hair to look at him. “He’d better not find a nine millimeter there waiting for us.”
Mike froze. That was exactly what was there. Looking around with his eyes because he couldn’t move his head without becoming a bald man, he could see Benny standing near his chair with gloves on searching for the gun. Mike knew he’d been had when he also noticed that his good friend Benny Richey had a flack vest on that had the word POLICE written across it in bold white letters.
“You fucking cock-sucking son of a bastard. You’re a cop.” Mike’s head hit the floor hard enough that he saw stars. “I’m suing you if you do that again.”
And of course, the man at his back popped his head again. “This is not good, Mikey boy. Not good at all. Whatever will the judge think when he finds you’ve had a little piss shooter waiting on us? And one that didn’t work too. Shame on you. Shame, shame.”
Mike looked over at Benny again and glared. The bastard had sold him out and given him a gun that wouldn’t work. Life couldn’t be this cruel to him. He’d been a good person. Well, for the most part anyway. And now one stupid bitch tells lies and here was being treated like a criminal.
He was jerked up off the floor quickly. He wisely kept him mouth shut. Before he could get his bearings he was out the door and into a dark SUV and speeding down the road. Mike looked over at Wilbert when he laughed.
“Didn’t you know a man in as much trouble as you shouldn’t trust anyone? You’re a very stupid man, very. And possession of a fire arm.” Wilbert tisked at him. “Can’t make you look like the outstanding citizen you seem to think you are.”
“I’m going to get off this. And you know it if you read what I told you. I didn’t do a damned thing to those women that they didn’t beg for. Women like these are just begging for some time in the limelight.”
Wilbert laughed again. “If you say so. I will defend you to the best of my ability because the courts say I must, but I hope you rot in a prison.”
Mike had a thought that he might be fucked here, but they were pulling up in the back of the courthouse and he was again being jerked about. His lawyer was being treated like he was royalty while he was being tossed about like he was somebody’s bitch. Things were going to change when he got out of this.
He was shoved in a cell and told to behave. Like he could do anything else. His hands were cuffed behind him and there was a bar between his ankles that kept him from walking correctly. He was handed an orange vest that had been pulled over his head before he’d left the house, but it wasn’t until just now that he realized that it was a flack vest. He frowned when he thought about why someone would think he needed it.
He looked up when the door finally opened and three police officers he’d never seen before came in. He was suddenly nervous, terrified, and sick all at once. One of them barked at him that if he had to go, now was the time to do it. Go where he couldn’t think, unless they were letting him go because they’d figured out it was all a lie, but the officer nodded to the single toilet in the corner. Glancing at it Mike shook his head no. There was no way he was pissing in front of these guys. He just knew they had no intentions of letting him have a moment.
~~~
Royce looked up when Mike White was brought into the room. He grinned when Mike staggered a couple of steps, but moved to his seat next to his lawyer after that. Royce was very happy to see that the prick was afraid of him.
“Behave or I’ll send you home.” He looked over at Kasey when she spoke. “I mean it. You behave or I’ll make your brothers take you home and lock you in the closet until this is over.”
He snorted, a nice little habit he’d picked up from Kasey. She raised her pretty brow at him, something he was sure she’d picked up from him, and nodded. He felt rather than heard someone move behind him.
“I wouldn’t if I were you.” He did glance behind him and saw Jared Stone standing there. “Jared, you know I’ll kick your ass if you touch me right now. And that pretty little wife of yours will be working that new site all on her own for a little while.”
“Then don’t make me have to kick your ass. Besides, she brought in the big guns. My mom and dad are both here.” Royce looked over at the Stones and nodded while Jared laughed. “My mom said to tell you that as far as she’s concerned, she and your mom can bring you to heel in no time.”
Royce thought he was right. Mrs. Stone terrified him as much as his own mother did. He’d never tell her that, but he was reasonably sure she knew it already. Jared sat down next to him and stretched out his long legs.
“You’re so going to pay for this, you know that, right?” Jared grinned and nodded. Royce leaned closer to Kasey and whispered in her ear. “And you are as well. Keep it up, love, and your bottom will be nicely pinked up when you go to the doctor tomorrow.”
Royce rubbed his hand over her belly. She was nearly due now and he was getting more and more excited every day. They were married now, had been for about five months, and they were having a blast. And as soon as their son was born, they were going to have their honeymoon. He wasn’t even considering this trial an issue for them. She put her hand over his, moved it around her swollen belly, and he felt his son kick.