by Whitley Cox
Scott could practically hear Eva gulp next to him. Or maybe that was him gulping. Either way, a huge knot bobbed in his throat as they followed Liam into Zak’s kitchen. The kids—even the older ones—were all out in the driveway doing chalk art with a couple of women—drinks in hand—supervising. The rest of the group took up various pockets throughout the yard or house, caught up in conversations.
“In here,” Liam said, jerking his head toward the empty living room. They followed him. “You might want to sit down,” he offered to Eva.
She shook her head, her body stiff, jaw set tight. “I want to stand. Now please, tell me what your PI found out about Todd.”
Liam’s lips flattened. He dug into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a manila envelope that had obviously been folded once lengthwise. “It would appear that your husband—”
“Ex-husband,” Scott corrected, not blinking as Liam unfolded the envelope and began pulling out papers and a few photos.
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, I have copies of all of these at my office, just so you know. But it would appear that your ex-husband’s businesses are not what they seem. They are in fact fronts for other businesses. His strip club runs a pretty pricey escort and prostitution service out the back. He launders money through the gentlemen’s club and his nightclubs to fund his other ventures, like illegal arms dealing.”
Eva’s hand flew up to her mouth to smother her gasp.
“His casinos have some shady shit going on in them too, though my PI is still digging to get more details. From what he can tell though, high rollers are given access to some underground betting. McGregor, my PI, thinks it might be dog or cockfighting—possibly even people fighting. At least that’s his guess. They go into the casino but then disappear, emerging hours later, sometimes through a door around back.”
With each word Liam spoke, Eva’s head began to shake faster.
“And lastly … ” Liam exhaled, handing her a photo of Todd with his arm around a woman who looked not much older than her niece Sabrina. “He was spotted two nights ago with this woman. They climbed into his town car together. Now McGregor wasn’t able to get a real name for the woman, but none of us believe that she’s old enough to be in a bar or casino, let alone dating a thirty-seven-year-old man.”
“I doubt there’s much dating going on,” Scott muttered.
Even with the tight, revealing clothes and makeup, the woman with Todd looked no older than thirteen or fourteen. Was he not only running a prostitution ring, but an underage prostitution ring at that? Could the man get anymore disgusting?
Did they want to know the answer to that?
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she whispered, handing the photo off to Scott. Her cheeks had lost all their color, and her eyes no longer held that spark he loved. Her sunglasses were pushed up into her hair, and she mindlessly reached for them, her hands shaking as she cleaned the lenses on the hem of her shirt. He could practically see the fear clawing at her as she came to terms with the fact that she had been married to this man—and probably while he was doing all of this shit. She had loved this man. He was the father of her children, and he did despicable things, cruel things. Evil things.
Scott already knew it to be true after what he’d done to Eva, but now more than ever he was convinced that Todd Fletcher was the walking definition of a soulless, psychopathic demon.
“So what do we do now?” Scott asked, taking the notes and photos from his brother and putting them all back into the envelope.
“Now, we go to the police,” Liam said. “There’s too much illegal shit going down for us to just sit on it and use it as leverage for your relationship. Hopefully, the guy gets found guilty and sent to prison, then we don’t have to worry about him for twenty-five years—if he gets life.”
Eva’s thumb was wedged between her teeth, and she stared straight ahead at nothing in particular. “But you said your PI is still working on getting more information about what’s going on in the casinos?”
Liam nodded. “He is, yes. He might bring in an associate, and then Quincy can pose as a high roller and potentially get an invite. McGregor is like ninety percent sure it’s dogfighting. He could have sworn he heard dogs barking when he was scoping out the back of the building.”
“That’s fucking disgusting.” Scott’s words came out through clenched teeth. He focused on his brother but kept his arm tightly wrapped around his woman. Her body was iron-stiff. “So then maybe we should sit tight until McGregor gets back to you with more information. The more dirt we have on Fletcher, the more ammo the prosecutor has to fire at him, right?”
“Yes,” Liam confirmed. “That’s right. And everything the PI has uncovered so far would hold up in court. We could put Fletcher away for a long time with what we already have on him.”
Eva had gone silent, her gaze once again focused intently on nothing in particular.
He pecked her on the side of the head. “Eves, you okay?”
She blinked up at him, her head shaking slowly. “Would you be?”
Good point.
He squeezed her tighter. “We’ll get through this, okay? Liam is helping. McGregor is on it. We just need to lie low for a bit longer until McGregor gets us the rest of the information, then, with Liam, we’ll take it to the police.”
Her jaw trembled, and tears welled up in her beautiful eyes. “Only twenty-five years, Scott. What if it’s less? What if he gets a lighter sentence or community service or just a fine? Even if it’s ten years, eventually he’ll get back out, and then he’ll come looking for me. For us.”
He wrapped her up in his arms, determined to absorb as much of her pain and fear as he could. His chin rested on the top of her head, the fruity and feminine scent of her shampoo driving his senses wild. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, okay?” He glanced at Liam. His brother was normally one of the most confident men, sure in his plan and downright arrogant about how successful of a lawyer he was. But right now, the look on his face gave Scott anything but faith in the justice system. Liam was well aware of how connected and powerful Todd was and that Eva’s concerns were not unfounded. Todd could get a puny sentence, and then he’d be out and he’d be furious.
Liam cleared his throat. “Do you mind if I ask who represented you during your divorce? If you weren’t happy with them, I’d be more than happy to make some recommendations.”
“Richelle LaRue, of Epstein, Singh, Rosales and Marsh. She was phenomenal. Have you heard of her?”
Holy shit, was Eva’s lawyer Liam’s Wednesday night fuck buddy? What were the chances?
Liam’s lip twitched and his brown eyes glittered. “I have heard of her, and you’re right, she is phenomenal. Good job landing her as your attorney.”
She managed a grim smile. “Thanks. I guess she’s been through a nasty divorce herself, so she sympathized with my plight. Got me the best deal she possibly could.”
Scott fixed his brother with a questioning look, but Liam’s quick head shake shot it down, and Scott swiveled his eyes back to his woman.
A cacophony of noises in the kitchen prompted her to pull out of his arms. “We should go check on the kids,” she said, wiping her eyes with her thumbs. “Mine are probably wondering where I am.”
“I’m sure they’re all having a blast on the grass,” Liam offered, his tone chipper but his face still stoic. “Zak’s got a soccer net set up, and Tia brought out her bubbles for the littler kids.”
Scott was reluctant to let her go, not only because her touch and presence at his side grounded him, but he also felt the need to protect her, to remind Eva that he would protect her. He would be there for her, be her knight in shining armor and keep her safe from her satanic ex.
They rounded the corner into Zak’s enormous, state-of-the-art kitchen to find all of the women standing around the island, wine in their glasses, as they ogled the blue-eyed baby Brielle in her mother’s arms.
All eyes turned to face them.
“Leave us,” Tori, Mark’s girlfriend, ordered, lasering her sapphire gaze on Liam and Scott. “We want to meet Eva without either of you around.” She poured a lovely looking rosé wine into a stemless glass and handed it to Eva. “From the sounds of things, you might need something stronger.”
Eva accepted the glass and pounded it back. “Yeah, I think I might.”
18
“They’re their children too,” Paige said, curling her legs beneath her on the sofa in Zak’s living room. “Let the men watch the kids. We have things to discuss.” She thanked Isobel for the flask and took a hit, her eyes flaring as her mouth pinched into a tight pout. “That shit is strong.” She passed the flask to Eva.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” Tori started.
“Or me,” Isobel added.
“But we may know a guy who knows a guy who has a moonshine still in his garage. I add a splash of blueberry syrup to make it palatable,” Tori said. She put her hand next to her face and whispered. “It’s our uncle. But you didn’t hear it from us.”
“And it hasn’t made anybody go blind yet?” Zara asked, clucking her tongue as if she’d just bitten into a lemon, her eyes blinking double-time.
Tori and Isobel shook their heads, their similar dark brown ponytails swishing behind them. “Pretty sure he’s been making it for close to twenty years, and he’s never made a person go blind,” Isobel said.
Eva put her nose to the mouth of the flask and sniffed it. She reared back when the alcohol fumes hit her nostrils.
“I swear it’ll take the edge off,” Tori said.
“And put hair on your chest,” Isobel added with a giggle.
Well, she was certainly on edge. Maybe one little sip. Just to relax her. To get her mind off Todd and his money-laundering, dirty-pimping ways. She cringed at the thought of him being a pimp and running a prostitution ring or a dogfighting circuit. He fit the bill for that kind of business though. Soulless and cruel. Not caring at all who he extorted as long as the lion’s share of the money wound up in his pocket.
The urge to vomit was real and strong when she thought back to that picture of him with his arm around that woman who was probably not a woman at all. She was probably a teenager. A runaway. Somebody’s daughter. Somebody’s baby.
She tipped the flask up and took a long, fortifying pull.
Then she started coughing.
Holy shit, that stuff was strong.
“Yeah, you kind of need to sip it,” Isobel said. “It’s not like tequila where you can take a shot.”
Eva usually sipped tequila too.
Her throat burned, and her vision went spotty.
Oh God, was she going blind? Was she that one in a million person who was actually going to go blind from drinking moonshine?
“Breathe.” Aurora chuckled next to her and pounded her a couple of times on the back. “The feeling won’t last, and your vision will return.”
Snickers drifted around their circle.
She passed the flask to Aurora. Without flinching, the young woman took a sip, then passed it over Eva to Violet.
Cradling a snoozing and nursing Brielle in her lap, Violet shook her head. “I’m nursing and only comfortable having wine.” She held up her free hand, her eyes turning worried. “Not that I don’t think your uncle knows what he’s doing, it’s just I was only approved to drink wine or beer by my doctor. They don’t really include the effects of moonshine on your breast milk in the New Baby handbook.”
“They might in Arkansas,” Lowenna added, tittering at her own joke. She’d been quiet up until now, sitting next to Violet and staring fixated at Brielle. According to Tori, who seemed to be the ringleader, Lowenna was the newest addition to their little group. She was with Mason, and the two had started dating around Valentine’s. But she was welcomed into the fold with open arms, according to Tori, because with Lowenna came an endless supply of chocolate.
“We don’t know everything that’s going on with you,” Tori said, sipping on her wine and uncrossing, then re-crossing her legs. “But we know enough. The guys talk, and then they talk to us. We know that your ex is a dick and he’s now Scott’s VIP client.”
Eva exhaled deeply through her nose and nodded. “Yep. Huge conflict of interest that Scott’s boss just doesn’t seem to care about.”
Heads shook around the living room.
“That’s stupid,” Zara muttered. “Though, apparently, so is Scott’s boss, so it makes sense, I guess.”
Eva hinged forward from where she sat on one of the couches, squished between Violet and Aurora, and picked up a piece of chocolate from the tray. It looked heavenly. Pink and shimmery, almost too beautiful to eat.
“Smoked peach jam with peach oolong ganache,” Lowenna said. “A new flavor that we’re trying out. Let me know what you think.”
Eva popped the lovely little morsel into her mouth and crushed it between her teeth. Her eyes slammed shut, and her head tilted skyward. A moan she had zero control over erupted from the depths of her chest, and her toes curled in her flats.
“Yeah, we all have that reaction when we try a new flavor of Lowenna’s,” Violet said next to her. “Orgasmic, right?”
Eva opened her eyes, heat filling her cheeks as every woman’s gaze said the same thing.
“It’s okay,” Isobel assured her. “Even if that’s your O face, we don’t judge. Seemed pretty tame to me, honestly. You should have seen Tori’s chocolate climax when Lowenna brought out her raspberry caramel bonbons atop pistachio gian … guan … ?” She glanced at Lowenna.
“Gianduja,” Lowenna finished. “It’s a paste usually made with hazelnuts and sweet chocolate, but I tried it with pistachios and it turned out—”
“Fucking amazing,” Violet, Paige and Tori all said in unison.
Lowenna’s gray-silver eyes sparkled, and her cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink. “Thanks.”
Next to her, Violet shifted and fanned herself with one hand. “This baby is a furnace,” she said. “Just like her father, she retains heat like a black car.”
“May I?” Eva asked, giddy at the thought of getting baby snuggles. It’d been too long since she held a wee one in her arms. Too long since she felt the calm of innocence enfold her.
“By all means.” Violet propped a noodle-limbed Brielle in her arms and then did the transfer like a pro.
Eva nestled the baby in the crook of her arm and made sure Brielle’s arm wasn’t trapped between them. The little girl never even cracked open an eyelid. She was off in baby dreamland. Her lips pursed into a tight nursing pout, and once in a while she’d do a sucking motion—like she was dreaming of the boob. Then she’d squeak, squirm and settle right back down.
“This might be better at taking the edge off than the moonshine,” she said, slipping her finger beneath Brielle’s hand and waiting for the baby to grasp it. She did.
“I know, right?” Violet said, pulling her gray T-shirt away from her body and flapping it a few times to cool herself down. “But a break from them is nice once in a while too.”
“So you and Scott are neighbors?” Zara asked. She seemed to be the oldest woman in the bunch. Not that she didn’t still hold the vibrancy and beauty of youth like the rest—because honestly, the woman was a stunner—it was more the air around her that spoke of maturity and grace. Like she knew what she wanted out of life and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind or go after her goals. Whereas the other women seemed more caught up in the drama and dysfunction of life—just like Eva was.
“We are,” Eva replied. “Though we met prior to the boys and I moving in next door.”
Isobel popped a chocolate into her mouth. “Oh? We haven’t heard this story.”
Ah, she might as well just get it out and over with. It was only a matter of time before they found out, and besides, she really liked these women. They were open and honest, funny and kind, and the way they welcomed her into their tight fold warmed her heart to no end.
She reached for another choco
late and this time bit down on it with her front teeth to savor the sweetness. Her eyes glazed over.
“Cinnamon pear and caramel,” Lowenna said to the chuckles of the other women.
Eva swallowed the little bite of ecstasy and began with her story. “We met at a bar. We were both there with terrible parties. We ditched them and went back to my hotel room.”
“Oooh,” Zara cooed, “that’s like Emmett and I. We got busy the first night we met too.”
Eva’s neck nearly snapped off, she whirled it around so fast to look at the woman beside her. Zara most definitely did not strike her as a one-night-stand kind of woman.
Well, she wasn’t. She’s still with Emmett.
True enough. But she still didn’t strike Eva as the type of woman who slept with a man she just met. Not that there was anything wrong with that—power to the feminists and all that—but Zara just seemed slightly more … reserved? Was that the right word?
“Yeah, we met three times on the same day, all by happenstance, and then the fourth time we met was at a New Year’s Eve party. We had sex on a wine barrel in Riley and Daisy’s wine cellar.” The rueful smile that tugged at one corner of her mouth accompanied by the gleam in her sky-blue eyes said that she was not only proud of her torrid little escapade but also interested in doing it again.
You go, girl.
Respect.
“Nothing wrong with getting the sexual compatibility test out of the way right away,” Aurora said. “Zak and I were the same way. Though I pined after him for six months before he even noticed me. So in my mind it wasn’t a first-night thing. We’d been having sex in my fantasies every night for a loooong time. It was like clockwork by the time I got the real thing.”
Everyone chortled. Then it seemed there was a collective agreement of momentary silence where wine was replenished, a couple of women got up to go to the bathroom, and Lowenna brought out another box of chocolates.
