Becky’s father huffed a laugh. Staring down his nose, he hocked out a glob of spit that landed perilously close to her hand. “Remember what I said. Come back and I’ll make you regret it. Becky ain’t your concern no more.”
The door slammed behind him, the slide of the chain lock being repositioned reaching her ears past the ringing that filled them. It took a minute before she could gather herself enough to struggle to her feet, seconds when she searched the windows of the trailer in hopes of seeing Becky’s face, making some kind of connection with the girl she’d grown so close to, but no face appeared. No sound came. Nothing.
She stood, dusting red clay from her backside with hands that shook like leaves, uncertain what to do. Whatever it was, she couldn’t do it alone. “I’ll be back, hon. I promise,” she said, knowing Becky couldn’t hear her but desperate to let the girl know. It felt like a betrayal to walk back to her car, slide behind the wheel, but what choice did she have?
David hadn’t defeated Goliath empty-handed. Her only choice was to find her stones and return to battle. That didn’t make it easier to back the car away from the trailer and drive away. She didn’t feel like David; she felt like a monster, leaving the victim with her abuser.
Without conscious thought, without a decision on her part, she pointed the car toward home, but when she reached the turnoff, she kept going. That same mindlessness took her miles down the road, south of town, past Lake McIntosh. Toward the piece of land that, no matter how lush with trees and hills, no matter how soothing the rocky creek that wound through its heart, shouldn’t be a balm. It should be a reminder of all she’d lost because of her own foolishness.
Too bad it was the only place she felt truly safe.
The canopy enveloped her car in hushed shadows as she nosed her way onto the dirt road, the only access to the property. That was all it took for the hard shell she’d surrounded herself with back at the trailer to crack.
Why are you doing this? You know you shouldn’t be here.
And yet here was the only place she could just be, where she could let the shaking overtake her and cry the tears choking the back of her throat and give in to the fear shuddering through her in soul-sucking waves. Here, where no one could see. Where no one knew how weak she really was.
Where she could pretend that the arms that used to hold her safe, right here in this very spot, were still around her.
It was stupid. Senseless. That didn’t stop it from being true. The sobs came, shook her down to her bones. She sobbed until her stomach turned to stone and everything inside it threatened to come back up. Her chest went tight as a drum and she had a hard time breathing, but she let herself ride the waves until, finally, the stress subsided.
Long minutes later the muffled ring of her phone pulled her back to reality. Scrambling in her purse, she felt the cool rectangle of her cell all the way at the bottom and pulled it out. A glance at the screen brought a groan to her lips.
She tapped the green circle. “Mom.”
The word wasn’t as bright and cheery as she’d like, but hopefully it was close enough to fool her mother. Both her parents were supportive of her charity work, and at twenty-eight they recognized the futility of convincing her to do anything else, but if they knew someone had threatened her? All bets would be off.
“What’s wrong?”
Thank God her mom couldn’t see the grimace that twisted her mouth. “Why would anything be wrong?”
“Don’t try that ‘answering a question with a question’ bit, young lady.” Kim Alexander might have been born and bred into the highest tier of Southern society, but she was also a hands-on mother who knew her daughter well, right down to the nuances of her voice. Damn it.
Leaning her head back on the headrest, Charlotte let a heavy sigh escape her, taking the last of her tears with it. The tension in her belly stayed behind. “Just some things going on at work, Mom. Really.”
“Did the luncheon go well today?”
Creating Families had gained generous donations this afternoon, no doubt about it. But it was what they’d lost, what Becky had lost, that consumed her.
“Very well.” She cranked her car, another sigh escaping her when the cool air from the vent hit her heated face. “I’m just about to head home.” It was early for her, but today had been far longer than the actual hours she’d put in.
A long silence on her mother’s end didn’t bode well for her chances of ending the interrogation. Then, “I’ll make some tea; how does that sound?”
Tea cured a multitude of ills, according to Kim Alexander. “Make mine iced and you got it. I’ll be there in a little bit.”
“Sacrilege!” A smile flavored her mom’s words. Delicate laughter filtered through the line, curving Charlotte’s lips despite her worries. “I’ll make it anyway. Be careful, hon.”
Careful. She glanced at the beauty before her. She needed to be careful with more than just driving.
Packing her emotions and her memories away, she put the car in reverse. Headed toward the highway and home. But with every mile, Becky’s situation nagged at her. The pain in the girl’s eyes. The bruise on her cheek. There had to be something she could do.
First things first. Time for a legal opinion. Hitting speed-dial on her console, she waited for the phone to ring.
“You’ve reached Wes Moncrief. I’m away at the moment. Please leave a message so I can return your call.”
Beep.
“Hey, Wes. It’s Charlotte.” She didn’t have to identify herself—they’d known each other practically since birth, which was part of why he was her closest friend—but she did anyway. Always. Because…
She pushed that thought away.
“Listen, I was hoping I could talk to you about something going on with one of the girls. I just…I don’t know.” She paused to round a curve, trying to bring her words together and failing. Chewed the inside of her lip. “I need some help.”
Accelerating through the bend in the road, she eyed the short straightaway ahead. Could Wes help? He served as part of the legal team for Creating Families, but Becky had already terminated her agreement. What could he do?
Ask that question when you talk to him.
For now she said, “The situation’s complicated, but I’m hoping...” What? She slowed for the next curve. “I don’t know. We’ll talk later. Will I see you at—”
A flash at the corner of her eye had her jerking her head around.
A pickup truck, its grill massive to her eyes, barreled toward her from a side road. There was no time to get out of the way. There wasn’t even time to scream. One second she was staring down that grill; the next, everything went black.
Chapter Two
A huge yawn crept over King Moncrief before he could hold it back. The sound of his jaw popping was loud in his ears.
“Look at that yawn,” Saint, his best friend, crowed. “Only one thing makes you that tired, right, buddy?”
“Jet lag?” Elliot asked, tossing the files she carried onto the conference table. Since King had returned from an off-the-record assignment in Ireland just yesterday, it was a reasonable—and much more likely than what Saint was thinking—guess.
“No,” Saint growled.
Elliot chuckled, the sound rich with amused condescension.
King’s laugh was more subdued. Jet lag was definitely kicking his ass this morning. Saint knew him far too well to think he’d been out partying, but that didn’t stop the prick from giving him a hard time.
Work had provided all the excitement they needed lately, just not the good kind. Dain, their team lead, had almost lost his wife to a workplace hostage situation; Elliot’s rapist/slaver father had tracked her down and almost killed her; and just last week, a close friend of their team, Fionn McCullough, had needed help in Ireland to protect his mother from the head of an Irish cartel.
Hopefully things would slow down now. They could do their jobs for JCL Securities, relax on their off days, and get back to some
sense of normal. At least until Dain and Olivia’s baby was born, but that was closer to Christmas, nearly two months away.
The door to the conference room opened, and Dain walked in. “Morning.” He strode to the head of the table, a cup of coffee in his hand, his thick black Mohawk spiking the air like he’d jammed his fingers through it on the way here. “We’ve got some cleanup on a couple of cases that we need to get to work on—”
Groans circled the table. Cleanup was code for paperwork, and no one wanted to do paperwork.
Dain flashed a sadistic grin. “Stop whining, babies.”
Saint fake cried. Elliot knocked him upside the back of the head.
“King, you’re excused.”
King straightened, grimacing as tension pulled at his fatigued muscles. Jet lag really was a bitch. “What did I do?”
“Nothing. You have a visitor.” His boss settled in the chair at the head of the table and opened the laptop he’d been carrying. “There’s nothing urgent going on right now that we can’t handle, so head on over and see what he wants. He’s waiting for you at Lori’s desk.”
“Why didn’t she call me?” And who the hell was visiting him on a Monday at seven thirty in the morning?
“’Cause I was passing by at just the right time.” Dain’s dark eyes fixed on him, the lack of tension there telling him the work they had this week truly wasn’t pressing. King pulled his weight, always. More than his weight if his team would let him, which they didn’t most of the time. They were all alphas, Elliot included, and none of them let themselves slack off.
Even Saint, no matter how laid-back and easygoing he seemed.
“All right.” Instead of wasting time asking more questions, he nodded at his teammates, flipped Saint a bird while Dain was distracted by his computer, then took himself and his coffee out the conference room door.
JCL Securities had made a name for itself from the day the business opened. Conlan James and Jack Quinn, the owners, were already well-known in the local security community before they’d gone into business together. Now, just eight years later, they were the premier security company in the US. King had joined them, and Dain’s team, after several years with the Atlanta PD, and he hadn’t looked back. The hands-on approach to keeping people safe, to saving lives, was all he’d hoped for when he’d left home a decade ago.
Service was in his heart, even if it wasn’t in his blood. It was his passion. He didn’t think he was capable of feeling for a woman what he felt for his work. Not anymore.
The front office of JCL was painted a cool, serene blue, the corner taken up by a trickling fountain that calmed the nerves of those who waited here. Lori Jordan, the front receptionist, had been with the company from the get-go. She ruled the office with an iron fist gloved in Southern sweetness that could charm the gruffest, snootiest clients. This morning she matched the room in a pale blue dress that flowed down her arms and fluttered across her collarbone.
“Morning, Miss Lori.” He wasn’t sure why he called her miss. It just seemed to fit, had since the day he’d met her. “A Mohawked bird told me someone was here to see me?”
“More like a falcon.” Lori grinned. “A big one. That man has predator written all over him.”
A laugh lifted his fatigue the slightest bit. “No argument here.”
“You do have a visitor.” Lori nodded toward the corner. “A Mr. Wes Moncrief. I’m assuming you’re related?”
King heard her words, the name, but at the edge of his hearing where gray haze was taking over. All his focus had zeroed in on the tall man in a ten-thousand-dollar suit sitting near the fountain. His body was tense, his elbows on his knees, the fingers laced together in front of his face white where he squeezed them.
Wes. His first cousin. The cousin he hadn’t seen in a decade.
The reason for that gap pounded at his brain, threatening his control. King tightened the straps on the memories as he strode across the room.
“Is it Mom and Dad?” he asked. Wes’s body language screamed disaster, and there was only one reason his first cousin would be here, now, in his office, looking like that.
Wes’s blond head popped up, his gaze, a few shades darker than King’s own light blue, grabbing on to his like a lifeline. “What?”
King pulled Wes to his feet, absently noting that his cousin had filled out in the years they’d been apart. He’d grown into a man from the high school kid he’d been back then. And King had missed it. Grief creeped along the edges of his mind. “Mom and Dad. Did something happen to them?”
“No.” Wes shook his head, the vee between his brows deepening. “No, I’m here about Charlotte.”
All the breath left King’s lungs at the sound of her name. The straps keeping his past in check broke with a sharp snap, a million memories, sensations, emotions hitting him at once. Things he’d tried hard to forget. Things he’d never been able to completely erase. “Is she all right?”
God, please let her be all right.
“She’s—” Wes shoved a hand through his already mussed hair. “She’s all right. For now.” Glancing around the room, he lowered his voice. “Can we talk in private?”
“Of course. This way.”
His answer sounded so calm, like he didn’t want to shake his cousin until the answers to all his questions were forced through his rattling teeth. But no, he was King Moncrief. He was logical, in control. Cold, some people said.
He felt anything but cold right now.
The drumbeat of their steps echoed threateningly as they walked down the hall. They passed the conference room where his team was meeting, and he caught Saint’s glance up, his gaze following them. Farther down the hall, he opened the door to a smallish room with a window, the desk in the middle taking up most of the space. “Have a seat.”
Wes took the armchair in front of the desk, while King settled behind it. He’d left for Ireland in a rush last week, and the evidence of his hurry lay in the chaos on his normally neat desk. He ignored it, zeroing in on Wes. “Tell me.”
Worry clouded his cousin’s eyes. “Someone tried to kill Charlotte.”
If Wes had punched him in the gut, he couldn’t have been more surprised, but he kept the reaction locked behind a facade of calm along with everything else roiling inside him. “Why do you think that?”
“I don’t know why.” He rubbed at his eyes. “At least, I’m not sure—”
King held up a hand. “What do the police say?”
“Random accident.” Wes’s mouth tightened. “It wasn’t an accident. I don’t know why they won’t believe her, but I know it wasn’t.”
If they were dealing with the smallish station near his old neighborhood, the cops there played a lot of politics. Peachtree City was the wealthiest suburb of Atlanta, and serious crimes rarely occurred there. Knowing one had could hurt the city’s reputation.
The work part of King’s brain, the logical part of him, clicked on. This was Charlotte they were discussing, but he couldn’t think about that right now. He leaned forward over his desk. “Okay, start from the beginning. What happened?”
“She was coming home from work yesterday.” He glanced out the window for a second, his profile so like King’s that the familiarity gripped his heart, squeezing tight. He hadn’t seen a face that familiar in so long. “She was almost home when a truck smashed into her from a side street. T-boned her. On her side of the car.”
King sucked in his breath. He knew those roads. Wes had said Charlotte was all right, which meant she’d been incredibly lucky. A direct hit could’ve tumbled her down a steep hillside or, even worse, killed her instantly.
She could be dead. His Charlotte. Dead. He squeezed his hands into fists below the edge of the desk.
“She went over the railing”—King’s heart stopped—“but slammed into a tree a few feet down, keeping her from too far of a fall,” Wes said. “Luckily her car has direct assistance. The company called police as soon as the accident registered on their system.”<
br />
Thank God for expensive perks. He didn’t want to imagine her, hurt and alone, scrambling for a cell that could’ve been who knew where.
“Did whoever hit her stop?”
“No.” Wes’s eyes narrowed. “The police can’t find them. They think the guy ran because he didn’t want to be arrested, but…”
“But what?”
That blond head shook. Blue eyes bored into his. “She’d just been to visit a client. She told the police the father threatened her.”
“You think he could’ve had something to do with this.” It seemed a bit too obvious, and smart criminals usually avoided the obvious if they could. But King knew better than most that not all criminals were smart.
Desperation deepened the lines on Wes’s face. King couldn’t miss the intensity of emotion there, the fact that his cousin’s body practically shook with the need to do something. This wasn’t mere worry over a friend of the family. No, it was something much, much more.
He forced himself to tuck that thought away as well.
“That area has a clear line of sight. Whoever hit her knew she was coming. Where the road curves around the McAllister estate, with that reinforced guardrail? She was slammed into it, crushed between it and the truck before it gave way.
“The only evidence left behind was some paint scrapings and the rusted grill. A Chevy pickup, heavy duty, it looks like. They’re ‘looking into it,’”—Wes made air quotes—“but my friends at the station say they’re just blowing us off to keep us quiet.”
A work truck like he was describing was common in rural Georgia, but not in the exclusive area near Charlotte’s family home. Especially not a rusted one. “No one saw anything?”
“No. She was left there, alone, for around five minutes before the ambulance arrived.”
Anxiety tightened his muscles. Charlotte helpless, bleeding, hurting. All the discipline he’d learned as a cop, as a security specialist—hell, all the discipline in the world couldn’t keep him from picturing it. From needing to get to her. Keep her safe.
Assassin's Heart (Assassins Book 4) Page 20
