DARK PARADISE - A Political Romantic Suspense (19 page)

Ronan

“Why?” My jaw tenses. “Why’d
you run off?”

I don’t waste time with simple
pleasantries. I didn’t fly to Oakdale, Tennessee to waste time with small talk.

“Ronan, what are you doing
here?”

My elegant Camille stands in
the door of her mother’s home in plaid pajama pants and a faded gray t-shirt,
her dark hair piled into a messy bun and her face stripped of makeup.

“You disappeared,” I said. “You
didn’t return my calls. I was concerned.”

“I don’t want to do this
anymore,” she says.

“Don’t lie to me, Camille.”
It’s cold as hell outside, but I’m burning. “Did someone threaten you? Is that
why you ran?”

Her gaze falls to my shoulders,
then to the cement steps under my shoes. “Come in.”

I step inside a quaint split
level, welcomed by modest décor and 90s-era furnishings.

“Why haven’t you taken my
calls?” I ask.

“I don’t have the disposable
phone anymore,” she mutters.

“Where is it?”

“It’s gone, Ronan.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she
says, her eyes pleading along with her words. She takes a step back, her arms
crossed and posture guarded. “Let’s just go our separate ways and not make this
into something bigger than it needs to be. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Any trouble?” I laugh,
stepping into her space. She refuses to meet my gaze. “I don’t understand. We
had a great weekend together. We were looking forward to the next nine weeks.
Something had to have changed after I left. What happened, Camille?”

She peers over my shoulder
toward the window. “Did you come alone?”

“Oliver’s in the car. Why?”

Her chocolate eyes grow round
as her fingers cover her lips. “Oliver.”

“What?” My brows meet. “What
about him?”

“He’s always with you.”

“Right. He’s my assigned agent.
Required to go everywhere I go.”

“He’s . . . he’s . . .” She
runs past me, glancing out the window and taking a closer look. From where I
stand, I can tell he’s on his phone. “It’s been him all along.”

“What are you talking about?”

She collapses on a nearby
loveseat, her head in her hands.

I take the spot beside her,
hooking my arm around her back.

“Your mother,” she says. My
heart drops. “She came to my room yesterday morning, just after you left.”

“Oh, God.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Ronan.
She made it very clear that I’m not to have anything to do with you.” Camille
turns to look out the window again, and we watch as Oliver ends his phone call.
“I guarantee you he was just speaking to your mother.”

Her words send a chill to the
room.

“When I got home yesterday,” I
say, “someone had slid a postcard of the Melrose under my door. And a packet of
photocopied journal pages was on my bed.”

She points at her chest. “My
journal pages?”

I nod, lips pursed.

“She told me she’d taken precautions.
That she knew everything we’d done, every place we’d met. She said she had my
journal.”

“Did she threaten you?”

Camille chews her lip. “In not
so many words . . .”

“Fuck.” I run my fingers
through my hair. Just being here with her is putting her safety in jeopardy,
and out of everyone, I’ve seen firsthand the lengths my mother is willing to go
to
to
get what she wants.

I rise.

“Where are you going?” Camille
stands.

“I need to buy us some more
time,” I say, staring at Oliver through the window.

“More time? No. Ronan. We’re
done. I don’t want to be involved in any of this. I don’t want to look over my
shoulder the rest of my life.” She places a hand against my chest, and I cover
it with mine.

“You don’t understand,” I say.
“You think she’s going to let you walk away just like that? After she clearly
threatened your life? You think she’ll be content knowing some little twenty-four-year-old
has the power to take down the Montgomery name? You clearly don’t know what
that woman is capable of.”

Camille’s fingers tremble, and
I lift them to my lips, staring into the brown eyes I’ve come to associate with
the only true freedom I’ve known in almost thirty years.

“So she’ll kill me anyway.” Her
words are flat, weighted with fear and a lead balloon.

“She convinced you to stay away
from me,” I say. “But how can she guarantee you’ll never spill her secrets?
There’s only one way.”

“Why would she offer me millions
of dollars to go away?” Camille asks.

“Because it was a short-term
solution to a long-term problem, and in her eyes, you’ll be long gone before
you ever see it.”

Camille lowers herself into the
sofa, staring blankly ahead. “I’ve been so careful all these years. I did
everything I could to avoid the very thing happening right now.”

An ironic laugh leaves her
pretty lips, and she pulls in a ragged breath.

“It’s all my fault. I brought
you into this. You agreed to a simple arrangement that no one in their right
mind would’ve turned down, but you didn’t agree to any of this,” I say. “Which
is why I promise you, Camille, nothing is going to happen to you. I’ll make
damn fucking sure of it.”

I pull her into my arms again
and away from the view of the window, cupping her pretty face in my hands and
crushing her trembling lips with mine.

“I’m not done with you yet,
Camille,” I remind her. “I’m going to handle this, and when it’s over, we can
pick right back up where we left off.”

Her eyes squeeze shut.

“Let me deal with Oliver for
now. I’ll call you shortly. Keep your phone near,” I say.

***

“How’d it go?” Oliver asks when
I climb into the passenger seat of the rental Suburban.

“Not well.” I sigh, glancing
out the window. I can’t look at the bastard without wanting to knock him out.
“We’re done, Oliver. She wants nothing to do with me.”

“Probably for the best.” He
peers over his shoulder as he backs out of her driveway.

“Couldn’t agree more. The last
thing I need is some prostitute attached to my name.” I huff. “Don’t know what
I was ever thinking.”

“I thought you were crazy for
wanting to get involved in that mess in the first place. Tried to tell you, but
you wouldn’t listen. I just sat back and let you do your thing. Figured you
needed to get it out of your system before you get serious about your future,”
he says.

Everything about our
conversation is typical and casual, and I have a hard time believing Oliver
could betray me like that, but it’s the only logical explanation. He’s been
there all along, from the minute I first saw her and for every meeting since. With
all those spur of the moment meet-ups and last-minute location changes, someone
would’ve had to have tailed me twenty-four seven for the last month in order to
catch them all. Oliver makes sense.

“Want to grab a bite?” Oliver
asks, smirking. “If we can even find a decent place in this one-stoplight
town.”

“I have a headache,” I say.
“Not hungry. Just take me back to the hotel. I’ll just hang out there the rest
of the day.”

“Seriously?” he asks, turning
to look at me. “You’re going to sit inside a musty little room in the Motel 6
the rest of the day?”

I shrug. “May as well. What
else is there to do around here? I’m not trying to be seen, Oliver. The last
thing we need is for the whole world to know I was in Oakdale, Tennessee for no
apparent reason. If they go digging hard enough, they just might link me to
Camille, and then what?”

“All right, all right.” He
places a palm in the air and pulls into the parking lot of our hotel. “I guess
I’ll be in my room then . . . until tomorrow . . . doing nothing. At least they
have HBO, I guess.”

His job as my personal Secret
Service agent requires him to be by my side at all times, but we’ve been known
to break the rules a time or two over the years.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m not
going anywhere. If you want to drive around town or grab a bite to eat, by all
means, go for it.”

He pulls into a parking spot
not more than fifteen feet from our respective hotel rooms, and I pull the key
from my pocket. We climb out, and he escorts me to my room before heading back
to the Suburban. Inside, I watch out the peephole until he drives away, and
then I call Camille to come pick me up.

***

“I can’t believe I’m doing
this. You’re lucky I still have this rental car.” Camille’s delicate hands grip
the gray plastic steering wheel of a white Honda Accord.

She pulls away as soon as I’m
inside, and we drive back to her mother’s house.

“I’m going to err on the side
of paranoid,” she says when we pull into the driveway. “Stay here.”

Climbing out and running to the
attached garage, she punches in a code and returns to pull the car in. Oliver
would get in so much trouble if anyone knew he ‘lost’ me, and I smirk to myself
at the thought.

For the first time in years,
I’m one hundred percent untethered and untracked. And it feels fucking amazing.

Camille

“Would you like something to
drink?” I lean against the kitchen counter as Ronan stands before me.

Never in my life did I imagine
that someday the son of the President of the United States of America would be
hanging out in our tiny little kitchen in Oakdale.

But here he is.

In the flesh.

Looking like he could still
jump my bones despite the graveness of this situation.

My mom is going to freak out
when she comes home.

“No, thank you. Where can we go
to talk?” He looks so handsome today in his creamy cashmere sweater with the
button down and tie sticking up at the collar. Ronan couldn’t dress down if he
tried.

I feel silly in my pajamas. I
should’ve changed, but the second he left, all I could do was sit paralyzed by
the living room window with my cellphone in my shaking hands.

“Yeah.” I motion for him to
follow me down to the family room. The house is a mess. Mom’s slight hoarder
tendencies, coupled with the fact that she was always too busy working to pick
up the house on a regular basis, have given our house a permanent cluttered, if
not homey, feel over the years. “Sit wherever you’d like.”

He glances at our sagging plaid
sofas before perching on the end of one. I reach for the remote on the coffee
table, shutting off the episode of Judge Judy playing in the background.

If Ronan is judging the
surroundings, he does a good job of hiding his true feelings, and I appreciate
the courtesy.

“So what’s next, Ronan?” I ask,
clapping my hands across my lap. “Where do we go from here? And what kind of
target am I going to have on my back when the powers that be find out I’m
harboring President Montgomery’s son in my basement?”

“This past weekend.” He clears
his throat. “Something changed in me.”

I sink into the sofa across
from him, hooking my arm around the edge and picking at a loose thread. I need
to keep my hands busy to distract myself from the fluttering in my chest.

“I felt free with you,” he
says, “in a way I’ve never felt with anyone before. You’re easy to be around,
Camille. You’re playful and genuine and sexy.”

My chin tucks as a warm blush
covers my cheeks. If any other man said those words to me, I’d smile and
graciously thank him, barely giving myself a chance to let them sink in. But
they feel different coming from him.

“I’m not saying I fell in love
with you,” he says. “But I’m saying I probably could if I let myself. And that
says a lot, because I don’t even fucking believe in love. And I know you don’t
either. But tell me you felt it. Tell me you felt that spark of something so
real it terrified you.”

I did. I felt it. And I shoved
it so deep down inside me it couldn’t possibly see the light of day.

“I don’t know what’s real or
what’s not anymore,” I protest.

“Don’t lie to me, Camille.” The
hollow above his jaw tenses. “Did you feel something this weekend?”

“I enjoyed my time with you.”

He releases a hard breath, his
nostrils flaring and our eyes locking.

“Why the resistance?” he asks,
rising and moving closer. Within seconds, he stands before me, taking my hands
in his and pulling me up.

“At the end of the day, we had
a business arrangement,” I say. “It’s natural, when you spend time together the
way we did, for feelings to develop. Sometimes they’re confusing. But if
there’s anything I’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that they’re never
real. If you give them enough time, they eventually fade away.”

“I don’t want this to fade away.”
The smooth roll of his words makes my stomach tingle. “I knew you were special
when I first saw you, and I’ll admit it was the outside that caught my eye. But
now that I know the inside, Camille . . .”

His hand beneath my chin brings
my lips to his. A soft kiss preludes his fingers in my hair, and I’m as
weightless as I’ve ever been . . .

“You’re the most genuine woman
I’ve ever met, and I’ve barely scratched your surface,” he says.

As weightless as I’ll ever be .
. .

“My future was mapped out until
you came along. Every moment in my life was painstakingly planned and
controlled by my mother, even when I didn’t always realize it. I thought I knew
what I wanted.” He pulls in a loaded sigh. “And now, all I know is I no longer
want to be burdened by the Montgomery name and everything that entails.”

“What are you going to do?
Denounce your throne?” I half-kid.

“I know my mother better than
anyone else.” He holds my face in his hand. “And I’m going to end this the only
way I know how.”

I release a puff of breath. “How?
Cut her off at the source? That woman has
power
,
Ronan. I’m not sure how you’ll be able to stop her from doing what she’s
inevitably going to do.”

“I have an idea.” His eyes
squint softly and release. “Do you trust me, Camille?”

I stare into his calming blue
gaze and nod. “I trust you.”