JUSTICE
THE BANNING SISTERS TRILOGY
Shameless
Irresistible
Scandalous
OTHER TITLES BY KAREN ROBARDS
Shattered
Pursuit
Guilty
Obsession
Vanished
Superstition
Bait
Beachcomber
Whispers at Midnight
To Trust a Stranger
Paradise County
Ghost Moon
The Midnight Hour
The Senator’s Wife
Heartbreaker
Hunter’s Moon
Walking after Midnight
Maggy’s Child
One Summer
Nobody’s Angel
This Side of Heaven
Dark of the Moon
Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Karen Robards
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books hardcover edition July 2011
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Designed by Alissa Amell
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-4391-8370-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-8374-8 (ebook)
In memory of my beloved father, Dr. Walter L. Johnson, who passed away February 23, 2010
JUSTICE
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
CHAPTER ONE
“Will you marry me?”
Allison Howard’s eyes widened. Her lips parted in surprise as she watched the tall, handsome, rich, kind, charming, absolutely wonderful man who’d spent the last week totally sweeping her off her feet drop down to one knee in front of her on the boathouse path. He held her hand and looked up at her with a rueful twinkle. Behind him, the Jefferson Memorial glowed like a Japanese lantern against the star-studded sky. Its reflection in the rippling black water of the Tidal Basin made the scene breathtakingly lovely.
Like something out of a movie. Like something out of a dream.
“I-I …” She, who was always so articulate, so precise with her words, was at a loss for them now. She could barely speak, barely think, barely breathe. Her heart pounded. Her throat closed up.
This is all happening so fast. Too fast?
She’d left on a business trip, met him on the plane. In the brief time they’d been together, he had become the most important person in her life. Once she would have said that falling for a man in a week wasn’t even possible. Now she was so in love that she was ready to chuck everything—home, career, her whole hard-earned life—to be with him. If he asked her to, which he wouldn’t, because Washington, D.C. was his home, too, and he was as proud of her career as he was successful in his.
“Look, I got you a ring.”
The hand that wasn’t holding hers delved in his jacket pocket. He was wearing a suit, expensive and perfectly tailored, with a white shirt and a fabulous silk tie with discreet symbols that told anyone who knew anything about that sort of thing just how fabulous it was. Unfortunately, she didn’t yet know a lot about things like that, although she pretended she did. In this brave new world she was trying so hard to conquer, the world of wealth and power and privilege, she was still working to learn the language. And that tie was part of the language. Just like her short black cocktail dress was part of the language: in her case, Armani Privé. Although it had been purchased second- or third-hand at a consignment shop in Georgetown, no one knew but her. The dress was so understated that it screamed class, even if it was just a tad too tight around the hips and thighs. The sad truth was that at five-four and the one hundred forty pounds she had dieted down to—the bare minimum she was pretty sure she was ever going to achieve on her big-boned frame no matter how little she ate—she was never going to look totally elegant in clothes meant for a six-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound model. Just like her chubby-cheeked face was never going to be anything other than depressingly round.
He says I’m beautiful. Her pulse fluttered at the memory. Beautiful, sexy, the woman he’s been waiting for all his life.
“See?” He flipped open a jeweler’s box, offered it to her like he hoped what was inside it would persuade her. The glow from the memorial channeled into a dazzling beam as it struck a diamond the size of a dime. Her breath caught. When he pulled the ring from its box and slid it on the fourth finger of her left hand, the precious metal cool and slick against her skin, her knees went weak.
At last, my love has come along.
The words of the Etta James song swelled in her mind. It was so perfect—he was so perfect—everything was so perfect. For the first time ever, her life was perfect. Her career—she was a lawyer, a thirty-one-year-old associate with the prestigious firm of Ellis Hayes—was thriving. Her finances were secure, to the point where she would never again have to lay awake at night sweating about having enough money. She’d been so lonely for so long, so certain that she wasn’t the type of woman who would ever be half of a couple, so resigned to being single that she had never even realized how much she wanted more. And now—this. Her very own whirlwind romance. A marriage proposal. And to quiet her increasingly importunate biological clock, maybe, in a year or so, even a baby. Who’d have thought it?
Impossibly, incredibly, every dream she’d never even known she’d had was coming true.
How’d I ever get this lucky?
“Allie? You’re making me nervous here.”
She realized she hadn’t said anything, had done nothing but stare dumbly at him, at the glittering diamond. His thumb caressed her fingers, nudged the ring. His smile was a little crooked now. His eyes searched her face. He looked like he thought she might actually be going to say no. This hint of vulnerability in him—she hadn’t seen him vulnerable before—made her heart melt.
“Say something,
damn it. Say yes.”
She took a deep breath, striving to pull herself together enough so that she could actually speak. The thing was, she’d always been a little bit psychic. At least, that’s what she’d told the girls in the group home where she’d spent her final two years in foster care, before she’d aged out of the system at the ripe old age of eighteen. They’d been tough girls, tougher than she’d been, bigger and meaner than she’d been, but the psychic stuff had scared them enough to make them leave her alone. Now, looking down at the ring that glittered on her finger like her own personal North Star, she knew it was true: she was a little bit psychic, at least about this. Because something inside her recognized this man, this moment, as the way things were meant to be.
He was her fate, her destiny.
“Allie?” He frowned up at her. The light from the memorial painted him in a golden glow, and she saw that his face had hardened, as if he was physically bracing now for rejection. His hand tightened on hers to the point where his grip almost hurt as he rose lithely to his feet. That broke the spell.
“Yes,” she said. Then, giddy as his face changed, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
Grinning like an idiot, she threw herself into his arms. They closed around her, tight and strong, and hugged her to him. He was tall and solid, muscular from his running and workouts, fit and buff in a way she would never be, and she loved the feel of him. Loved the smell of him. Loved his dark good looks, his lopsided smile, his possessiveness where she was concerned. Surging upward, wrapping her arms around his neck, she raised her face for his kiss. As their lips met fireworks exploded behind her closed lids, and she knew she’d found her heart’s home at last.
“When?” he asked when finally they had to surface to breathe.
“When what?” Her arms were still wrapped around his neck. Across the Tidal Basin, all around them really, the city glittered like a jewel. At night Washington was so beautiful, with darkness acting as a veil to hide the seamier parts and thousands of lights turning the streets into a fairyland. Closer at hand, the branches of the Japanese cherry trees that made the city a mecca for tourists in the spring dipped and swayed in the slight breeze that had briefly chased away the usual late July humidity. Insects sang in high-pitched chorus. The soft slap of oars and distant murmur of voices from tourists manning a quartet of paddle boats around the Tidal Basin reminded her that they weren’t really alone, although the bend in the path that had taken them into the deserted area around the side of the memorial made it feel that way.
“When can we do the deed? Get married, I mean, not the other, although I think it goes without saying I certainly want to do that. As soon as possible, too.”
They’d fallen into bed together that first night. The sex had been steamy, intense, unforgettable. Since then, except for the necessary work she’d had to do for her firm, and herself, they’d basically gotten out of bed only to fly home. He kept telling her how hot she was, how amazing she was. With him, she actually felt hot and amazing for the first time in her life. Having always thought of herself as chubby and plain—hell, she was chubby and plain, no way around that—she had been amazed at the transforming power of love. Because he said she was beautiful, she felt beautiful, and that, she discovered to her wonderment, made all the difference. Just imagining what they were going to do in bed later made her blood heat. Now, she marveled, that feeling was hers to keep. Drunk with joy, she smiled up at him.
“Whenever you want.”
He grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that. How about—tomorrow in Vegas? I’ve got a private plane lined up to meet us at Dulles at midnight if you say yes. We’ll get married at one of those cheesy wedding chapels, take twenty-four hours for a honeymoon, then get back here and work out all the juicy details of how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. It’ll be something to tell our kids one day. Besides, it’ll be fun.”
At the thought of the children they would have together something warm throbbed to life deep inside her. Then she frowned a little as the tiniest of serpents poked its flickering tongue into her budding Eden. It was Saturday night, and the timetable he was proposing had a serious flaw.
“I have to work Monday.”
“So do I. So what? We’ll call in sick. You can miss one day, can’t you?”
His coaxing tone was irresistible. Besides, she could miss a day, she realized, without having to worry about the repercussions of not seeming totally gung-ho in her eighty-hours-is-a-normal-work-week firm. She had achieved financial independence. Impossible as it seemed, she didn’t even really have to go to work anymore.
And that was a dazzling thought that she vowed to ponder more fully later.
“Vegas it is,” she agreed happily. Then he laughed and kissed her and bundled her into a cab and rushed her off to her apartment in Logan Circle so that she could grab a few things, which meant, basically, retrieve her suitcase, which she hadn’t even yet had time to unpack. Luckily she’d had her clothes cleaned at the hotel before leaving, and they were as well suited for Vegas as anything else she owned, so now she could just pick the suitcase up and hit the road again. On the way, at his urging, she made a quick call to her mother to tell her that she was off to Vegas to get married. Not that she actually had a mother, at least not one she was in contact with or knew how to get hold of, so the call was placed to a cell phone she knew wouldn’t be answered, and she left a message while he listened with a lazy smile on his face. One day, when they’d been married awhile, she would confess to him that her mother was long out of the picture, if not dead, and the tale she’d spun for him of a mother and a sister in Baltimore had been a pretty story she’d made up to hide the ugly truth, but not now. She had always been ashamed of her lack of family, of growing up in foster care, and she was afraid that the truth would diminish her in his eyes.
That she couldn’t take.
She had just finished up by leaving a real message for her boss at work when they reached her apartment, which was on Q Street. It was the entire bottom floor of one of the street’s row houses, built in 1878 and currently painted mint green, with an elaborate facade and a much simpler interior, because keeping costs down while keeping up appearances had been paramount in the minds of the builder, who had constructed the linked residences in the then middle-class area nearly a century and a half earlier.
Opening the door, stepping into the air-conditioned darkness of her tiny foyer, Allison flipped on the light and typed in the security code to silence the tinny beeping that would turn into a siren if it wasn’t pacified within the prescribed two minutes. She was immediately greeted by Clementine’s questioning squeak as the cat swarmed in from the bedroom, where she presumably had been napping in her favorite spot, the middle of the bed. Clementine didn’t meow like most cats. Instead she made a variety of sounds, including a drawn-out quasi squeak, because her voice box had been damaged by the wire loop someone had tried to hang her with before throwing her tiny, apparently presumed dead body into the Dumpster from which she had subsequently been rescued, weak but alive, wire still around her neck, by a kindhearted garbage man.
“Hi, baby.” Allison scooped up the cat. There was nothing wrong with Clementine’s purr, and she rattled away as she rubbed her head against Allison’s cheek in obvious affection. Clementine’s silky fur was long and black with a single white spot in the middle of her neck that had made Allison think of a Hostess cupcake the first time she had seen her, in a cage at the animal shelter where Allison had been doing her first stint of required pro bono work soon after having been hired by Ellis Hayes three years before. In fact, she’d nearly named the scrawny kitten Cupcake, but she’d figured it gave away too much about her own inner proclivities.
“Damn, I forgot about the cat.” His voice held a hint of vexation, which made her frown at him.
Having closed and locked the front door and then stood silently watching as she’d typed in the security code, he now surveyed the two of them through narrowed eyes. He’d
never met Clementine before, of course. This was his first time in Allison’s apartment, in her real life, but he’d heard about the cat, probably way too much, since Clementine was practically Allison’s only family and she talked about her a lot.
“This is Clementine. Clementine, this is Greg,” Allison said by way of introduction, then passed her pet over to him. Clementine was nonnegotiable. Although if he said she had to choose …
“Love me, love my cat,” she added, but her eyes practically begged him.
After meeting her gaze for the briefest of moments, he seemed prepared to, tucking Clementine into the crook of his arm, stroking her small head. Clementine’s golden eyes looked mistrustful, which wasn’t surprising, given the cat’s history. Allison smiled in relief at the picture they made.
“I guess I just officially became a cat lover.” His answering smile erased any last flicker of doubt his earlier tone had raised.
“She’s a great cat. You’ll see, once you get to know her.”
“I’m sure I will,” he said. “Better hurry. If the plane has to wait, it costs me—us—a small fortune. Besides, I want to take you to bed, and I promised myself that the next time I did you’d be my wife.”
“I’m hurrying.” Allison turned and headed for her bedroom, flipping on lights as she went. His wife. Just hearing the words made her heart beat faster. As did the thought of how they would celebrate their wedding afterward. She had, she’d discovered, a real aptitude for passion, although she hadn’t had much chance to explore it before now. Fortunately, he had the patience and experience to teach her what to do with it. Her body quickened at the thought.
“There’s bottled water in the fridge,” she called over her shoulder, glad that she had something healthy, something he’d approve of.
Waving her tail and chirping, which was Clementine’s way of making conversation, the cat was at Allison’s side as she entered her bedroom. This time the chirps had an anxious quality to them, as if Clementine somehow knew that Allison was getting ready to leave again. Allison had left food and water out, and Paloma DeLong from Shelter House, the facility for delinquent teens where she had been doing her latest stint of pro bono work, had been checking in on Clementine in her absence. Surprisingly enough, because Allison didn’t have many emotional attachments or interests outside of work, Paloma had become a friend, and the work Allison had been doing for Shelter House had become something of a mission for her. Or maybe it wasn’t so surprising. The embattled girls there had touched a chord in her that must have been left over from her own rough teenage years. She understood them, felt the uncertainty and yearning and heartbreak behind their outward toughness, because she had lived it. Making a friend of Paloma had been an unexpected bonus. The only other time that Allison had gone out of town since Clementine had become a part of her life, she’d put Clementine in a kennel. Clementine had reacted so badly that the kennel had called and Allison had had to cut her trip short to rescue her. Anyway, she would put out more food and water before she left, and call Paloma in the morning and ask her if she would please keep checking on Clementine for another couple of days. Clementine would be fine, if not totally happy, until Allison returned.
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