Dangerous Flirt (23 page)

So close. She'd been so close to rubbing his face in disgrace and forcing
him to confront the wrong he'd committed against her, against them. Her baby Phil. He hadn't grown into the man she would have raised. Yet another sin committed by his father.

A cold numbness seeped into her, shielding her from the pain as blood loss overwhelmed her body's ability to function. The stars, brilliant against the cloudless fall sky, twinkled above her. With all she'd done, she wouldn't
be going in that direction. Her soul would sink into the ground, heating as she fell deeper and deeper into the hell below.

Salvation was for the living, and in her heart, she'd stopped living that night twenty-eight years ago. The truth crystallized in her mind, shattering her anger. Stunted with hurt and resentment, she'd surrendered to the black void without ever realizing it.

“I did what
I had to do.” Pain slurred her quiet words.

In an instant, Beth appeared above her and kicked the gun from her hand, not that there was any need. Sarah Jane barely had the strength to form words, let alone curl her fingers around the trigger.

Beth's heart-shaped face hovered in the center of her ever-darkening field of vision.

Then, the light disappeared.

There were no angels. No sweet face
of God.

Eternity spread out in every direction like a heavy quilt smothering her on a hot summer night.

Deputies swarmed around Beth as she tried to process what had just happened.

Her grandparents’ house.

The threats.

The vandalism.

The goons in Vegas.

Phil dying in front of her eyes.

Hank being shot.

All of it because of Sarah Jane's
hunger for revenge.

Unable to make sense of the truth, she wrapped herself in an icy detachment and distanced herself from the death and misery surrounding her. Lost in a wispy cloud of numbness, she continued to kneel by Sarah Jane's body. A breeze teased her hair, lifting the ends until the strands tickled her cheeks.

“Excuse me, ma'am, the paramedics want to check you out.” A deputy loomed
over her, holding out a hand.

Startled out of her daze, Beth shook off her protective mental gauze and emerged back into reality. She grasped the deputy's wide hand and pulled herself up, taking stock of the chaos.

Paramedics toting heavy duffel bags swarmed Hank and cut away the bloody mess of his jeans. Even from ten feet away, his knee looked like a mangled mess of shredded muscle, shattered
bone and blood. Fighting back the worry-induced nausea, she brushed past the deputy and rushed over.

“Will he be okay?” She squatted down next to him.

The paramedic stayed focused on Hank's injury. “Looks like the bullet missed any major arteries.” He zipped up his duffel and stood. “Be right back with the stretcher.”

He loped through the trees and toward the highway at an easy, steady pace.

“Thank God you're alright.” If she hadn't already been kneeling, relief would have knocked her to the ground. She sent up a quick prayer for Hank, for her, for everything.

“It takes more than a crazy lady to take me out.” Hank's large hand engulfed hers. “You have to remember the women in my family. I've had advanced training.”

Humoring him more than anything else, she smiled at his joke. But
the truth was they both would have died if his deputies hadn't arrived in time.

Her entire life she'd tried to encase herself in a protective bubble with the same single-minded conviction Sarah Jane had depended on for her plans of revenge. In the end, it had blown up in both their faces and she'd almost lost the only man she'd ever loved.

Lowering her face, she brushed her lips across his in
a brief kiss of hope, of new beginnings.

“It's all over, Beth,” he murmured. “Everything will go back to normal.”

“But I don't want that. I want more.” Certainty struck her like a lightning bolt. “There are so many things I've missed out on and left undone. All because I was scared.”

He squeezed her hand. “Of what?”

“I was scared of putting myself out there, losing someone or something else.
I went into estate law because it was low pressure. I loved the mental chess of being a trial attorney, but the risks were so high…”

Chest tight and throat raw, she stopped to swallow back the tears threatening to overflow onto her cheeks. Her abuelita had warned her all those years ago, but she hadn't understood. She'd been a scared eight-year-old with a broken spirit hiding in her bedroom.
The bed had creaked in protest when her grandmother had sat down. She'd wrapped Beth inside her warm embrace and kissed the top of her head. “God doesn't give you your family,” she'd whispered, “he gives you the strength and courage to make your own.”

For so long, she'd walked the wrong path, but not anymore.

“I thought by regulating everything in my life, I was keeping myself safe, insulating
myself. I never let go.” An unsure smile turned her lips upward. “Not until you.”

Hank contemplated her, saying nothing after her declaration. As the silence grew, a nervous energy fizzed along her skin and jumbled her stomach. Then a smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. All of the tension whooshed out.

“I love you, Beth Martinez. When we get out of here, there's an Elvis impersonator I'm
taking you to meet.”

“I have no idea what that means,” she laughed. “But I love you too. Always have. Always will.”

B
eth's nose twitched and the impending sneeze built until she couldn't hold it back any longer. The release sent a small cloud of dust up from the bookshelf where she'd plucked her parents’ wedding photo. Pivoting, she turned back toward the cardboard box on her walnut desk and dropped it in with the rest of her knickknacks.

“Bless you.” Ed Webster stood in the doorway
of her office at Webster and Carter.

In the three months since she'd last set foot in the law firm, he'd lost weight. His cheekbones stood out in gaunt relief from the rest of his face and dark circles had taken up permanent residence under his eyes.

“I haven't hired a new cleaning person since the last one quit. Sarah Jane would have taken care of it, and now…” He let his words die off and
shoved his hands in his pockets.

Tempted as she was to tell him to go to hell, she'd known when Hank dropped her off this morning that her former mentor wouldn't let her leave today without the talk.

“Come on in, Ed.”

Like a stray dog thankful for any scrap of affection, his face lit up and he hurried to an empty chair. “So, I can't change your mind?”

“I needed a change.” Switching over to
family advocacy law had been huge challenge, but she loved her new life. She'd never been happier.

“Yeah, I've gotten that from a lot of folks ever since…well, ever since it came out.”

That was small-town justice for you. Word had spread like wildfire and censure swept in behind, turning his bumper crop of a life into a fallow field. “I heard about the divorce. Sorry.”

He shrugged, his once
beefy frame shrunken to skeletal proportions. “To be expected, I guess. She'd always suspected there were others, but public confirmation was too much. This practice is all I have left and the bank is breathing down my neck, wanting the balloon payment for the loan I took to finance the land purchases, so I probably won't have it for much longer.”

Beth could only imagine what it had been like
for him. She'd lived under a microscope. Conversations had slammed to a stop whenever she'd rolled her cart into a new aisle at the grocery store, picked out Christmas presents at the mall or walked into the New Year’s Eve party at the country club. Dry Creek's gossips had rolled the situation around and examined it from every angle. No one had escaped scrutiny—including Ed's and Sarah Jane's son,
Phil.

“You know it's not true. Not that I can stop the talk. Not that anyone would believe me.”

He had to be kidding. “Don't bother. Sarah Jane told me everything. You may not deserve all the hell you're getting, but you're not the injured party here.”

“I was a different man then, drank too much and hurt people without a second thought. I was an asshole, probably still am, but nothing like
that. When Sarah Jane lost the baby—”

“Lost the baby?” She reined in the urge to slap him. “You make it sound like Phil wandered off from the hospital. The newspaper got ahold of the police reports. They found her diaries, almost thirty years’ worth of written misery. She gave the baby up for adoption in a pathetic attempt to hold on to
you
.”

“I haven't read the paper in months. Shit, is that
really what she wrote? I knew she’d been confused, but I hadn't realized she'd totally lost touch with reality.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Phil isn't our son.”

Before her eyes, Ed deflated. His face changed from haggard to haunted. His hands shook as he stared off into the distance.

“Right before I broke up with her, we went to Denver for the weekend for a client meeting. She was six
months pregnant, but no one knew. She'd worked so hard at hiding it under bulky clothes. I was panicking, worried my wife would find out. I'd tried to convince her to give the baby up, but she wouldn't.”

His voice trembled and he blinked several times before continuing.

“The cramps started at the hotel. She'd taken a bath, hoping they'd go away. I'd gone down to the hotel bar to mellow out with
a couple of bourbons. When I got back to the room two hours later, she was still in the tub. The blood…it was everywhere. They saved her, but the baby didn't make it.”

He didn't bother to wipe away the tears spilling onto his cheeks. “The whole time, I'd been wishing that baby would disappear. You'd think I would have been thrilled. A nurse came and took me to say goodbye in the morgue. They'd
cleaned him up, wiped away the blood and wrapped him in a blue-and-white striped blanket. Hell, he was so tiny, shorter than my forearm, with these little fingers that should have curled around mine.”

Beth sank down in her chair and Ed wept in front of her, silently.

“I knew she didn't believe me or the hospital folks when she woke up without a baby. Nothing we said could convince her. They'd
already cremated the baby. It was like he'd never existed.” Ed's voice broke and he gulped in air like a condemned man. “And damn my soul to hell, that's how I acted. Like it had never happened. Any time she brought it up I ignored her, until finally she made herself believe she'd given up the baby. I figured if it made my life easier for her to say that, then fine, I'd play along. But I never realized
she really believed it.”

Nausea rolled over Beth in waves as she gripped the arms of her desk chair, willing her stomach to relax. She wanted to scream “liar” at him, make him take it all back.

But his story answered one of the largest doubts about Sarah Jane. Finding her long-lost son in the office where she worked seemed a little too convenient. And how had she known it was Phil? Nearly thirty
years ago, adoption cases were considered closed. Even if both the child and the birth parent wanted to find each other, the hurdles were extraordinary.

The chance of Sarah Jane finding her son was astronomical. Her diaries had never detailed how she'd discovered what she believed to be the truth. Instead, she’d written about the curl of Phil's smile and the way he talked with his hands, so much
like his father that she just knew it was him.

“How could you have done this? People died because of you two and your twisted, fucked-up secrets.”

He sank farther into his seat, as if he could disappear into its leather cushions. “I never meant—”

“No, I'm sure you never did. You never meant to be an asshole. It was because you drank too much. You never meant to cheat on your wife. It was because
the others were so willing. You never meant to wreck a woman's psyche so thoroughly that she lost touch with reality and devoted her life to ruining yours. You don't mean to do a lot of things, Ed, but everything sure seems to go to shit around you.” She rocketed out of her seat, snatched the box from the desk and stormed to the door.

“I loved her once. I really did.”

The bittersweet vibrato
in his voice stopped her cold. She couldn't help but turn to take one last look at the man who'd unthinkingly hurt so many lives.

Ed still sat in the chair, facing away from her, a silhouette in the winter’s late-afternoon sunset spilling in from the window.

For most of her career he'd loomed large, dominating the conversation and tone in every boardroom he entered with just his presence. Now,
he sat alone in a fast-darkening room, eclipsed by the light of truth streaming down on him.

Nothing she could say would bring him any lower than he'd brought himself. Her new life started the moment she walked out the front door into the arms of the man she loved.

Without uttering a word, she turned and walked into the cold January sunshine.

B
eth blew some warmth onto her freezing hands. Early January in Nebraska would never be confused for a tropical island paradise. The frost-covered ground crunched under her boots when she stepped down from her grandparents' front porch to the hard dirt below and hustled to the crowd of people gathering on the driveway. What she wouldn't do for a cup of steaming coffee.