But what had I suspected? He was just a regular guy. A regular guy with a whole lot of issues who’d had an affair with a married woman once upon a time. Guys like Luke were a dime a dozen.
He led me to an office area, with a baby grand piano, a couch, a chair, and a writing table.
“We might as well chat here,” he said, then claimed a spot on the piano bench, gesturing to a wooden chair.
I hardly wanted to sit. I didn’t want to stand. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I stuffed them into the pockets of my pants. I was used to talking to clients, to pitching the need for security services, to giving orders to troops in Europe during my days in the Army.
But talking to my mother’s former lover from eighteen years ago gave uncomfortable new meaning. My throat was parched, and my tongue barely worked. But somehow I found the ability to speak, because I had to know what he’d told Detective Winston. I had to know if Luke had revealed anything about the intel I kept locked up tight. I swallowed roughly. “My dad’s case was reopened. The detective asked me about you and your relationship with my mom.” I jumped right in, hitting the key points without mincing words.
Luke nodded. “I am aware of that. I met him too. Winston. Seems sharp.”
“Yeah,” I said, but Winston’s skills at his job were beside the point. The point was this, so I asked firmly, “What does he know? Did you tell him how you knew my mom?”
“I told him we were in love, yes. And that it had been a mistake, since she was married,” Luke said, clasping his hands together. “I still ask God every day for forgiveness for having fallen in love with a married woman.”
I gritted my teeth. We all knew that. “That’s not what I meant,” I said, because I wasn’t here to talk about contrition for cheating. This was bigger. Heavier. I clenched my jaw, then took a breath, pushing on, speaking words aloud I hardly ever said. “I’m talking about her drug problem. The cocaine. That she got it from Stefano. Do they know?”
This was the first time I’d said those words aloud in nearly twenty years. Drugs. Cocaine. That Stefano was her dealer.
This was the secret she’d begged me to keep since I was thirteen—a year before the shooting—and had come home early from school on a half-day she’d forgotten about.
The day I found her cutting lines at her sewing table. With a rolled-up dollar bill, she’d leaned in and inhaled a line of white powder off her Singer machine.
The secret I’d kept.
25
Dora
More than eighteen years ago
He wasn’t supposed to be here.
No one was supposed to be here.
Just me, my machine, and this—the means to work faster, make more.
But when I looked up from the machine, there was my baby. My Ryan, his jaw hanging open. His eyes were ringed with disbelief, his voice wavering as he asked, “Mom?”
I froze, stunned for a split second, maybe fifty. I didn’t know, but I had to act fast. Think fast. Because no one was supposed to be home.
No one was supposed to see me.
Not my sweet Ryan, not any of my babies.
I couldn’t think. Emotions took over, gripping me.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” I said, as the tears started to flow. I got up quickly, rushed around the machine, and clasped him in an embrace. “Please, this is my last time. I’m trying to stop. I swear I’m going to stop. I promise.”
I clutched him as if my life depended on it, and begged him to never breathe a word.
No one could know. Not my husband, not my other babies, not a soul.
I couldn’t let anyone know.
He nodded, his mouth tight, his chin strong.
My tough, brave boy. He would always be my toughest.
And I would prove him right for trusting me.
And for looking out for me.
Over the next few months, I was determined to prove myself to him.
I told him I’d joined Narcotics Anonymous, and had found a sponsor for counseling and guidance. And in quiet moments, I pulled Ryan aside, reassuring him. “Please, Ry. I’m trying so hard, baby. I’m trying so hard to fight these demons,” I said to him. “Don’t tell your daddy, please. He’d just worry. And don’t tell your brothers and sister. I’m so ashamed, and I want to get well again. I’ve got a sponsor and I’m going to meetings, and I swear I’m going to kick this habit. I owe some money to the guy I used to buy from, and I’m working extra for the local gymnastics team to earn enough to pay him back. Once I do, I swear I’ll be free of this.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” he said.
He never did. He was so good. He kept it all locked up like I’d asked him to. Thank God. Thank the Lord for my Ryan.
He was the best at keeping secrets.
That’s why I knew I could ask him for one last favor when the cops were questioning me after my husband’s murder. I could ask him for the biggest one of all.
26
Ryan
When she’d told me to never say a word, I took that to heart. I put my brain on lockdown, some sort of self-preservation kicking in. It was all I’d been able to do. Zip it up, keep it quiet, and never speak of what I saw.
I never said a word.
Even when she met Luke at those meetings. Even when she fell for another recovering addict. Even when she was first questioned by police, and it all came to light that she’d not only been having an affair with that former addict at the time of the murder, but that she’d made a string of phone calls for two months to a man named Jerry Stefano. Why was she talking to him so much, the cops wanted to know.
She wouldn’t tell them.
She’d begged me again to stay quiet once more. She’d shut the door to my room, planted her hands on my shoulders, and given me instructions. “They haven’t found the person who shot your daddy. And they’re asking me all kinds of questions, and I’m petrified they’re going to try to frame me for his murder. You know what we talked about?”
Her green eyes were wild as she’d begged me, gripping me so tight as if that would ensure my silence, her hands curled around my shoulders. “If the police know I used drugs, if they know I bought them from Jerry Stefano, it will look so much worse for me. They know I’ve been on the phone with Jerry for months. I’m going to have to tell a lie about all those phone calls. He’s been calling to collect money, and if they know I was buying from him, they’ll paint me as a druggie murderer wife.”
I tried to connect her dots, but I spotted holes. There had to be a better way to prove she was innocent of the crime. I had to get her to see it. “But, Mom, wouldn’t they see you’re innocent if you tell them about the drugs? Wouldn’t it be better to have them know you bought drugs than to have them think you planned a murder?” I’d asked, trying desperately to understand why she didn’t confess her secret. She had to get it. I could see it easily—what she should do. Confess to the drug use, confess that was how she knew Stefano, confess that’s why she had called him.
Not to hire him to pull a trigger.
She shook her head. Vehemently, like she was snapping it back and forth. “No. Never. Trust me. It will only look worse, and I have to beat this rap. So I have no choice but to lie about Jerry. Luke is the only other one who knows the truth about those phone calls.”
Luke and me.
The weight of that resonated with me, like a door shutting.
Her lover and me.
Her two secret keepers.
Now, years later as an adult, I was asking the only other person who knew if he’d broken the code of silence.
I drew in a breath, looked at the man who’d had an affair with my mother, swallowed down the ancient disgust, and zoomed in on what I needed to know.
“Did you tell the detective that Stefano was her dealer?” I asked crisply, coolly, keeping all my emotions under control as I damn well knew how to do.
Luke shook his head, rose, and turned up the air conditioning in his piano room. The sound
of the whirring grew louder, as if Luke was using it as a buffer to cover up this conversation. I bristled inside, because I so often did the same thing. I’d cranked up the tunes in my car when Winston had made his follow-up phone call a couple of days ago.
Luke held up his palm, as if he were swearing in court. “I did not say a word. Her last wish before she went away was for me to keep that secret,” he said, his voice trembling. “She was terrified of Stefano. You never met him, Ryan, and I pray you never do. Bump into a guy like Stefano on the street and you run the other way.” There was rabid fear in his eyes as he offered this strange piece of advice.
I crossed my arms. I didn’t want advice from my mom’s lover. Besides, I wasn’t afraid. Not of Stefano—the scumbag who’d killed my father—and not of men like him. “I’m not scared of men who deal drugs to mothers and children,” I said, practically spitting out the words.
Luke’s gray eyes widened, and he reached out to grab my arm. “She was petrified of what would happen if people knew she was connected to him,” he pleaded.
I stared at him, impervious to his plea. Uninterested in anything but the full truth. “But their plan didn’t work. Their cover-up failed,” I said, reminding him that the lies my mom had told didn’t save her from jail. The truth would have tethered her more closely to the Royal Sinners, so she’d fashioned a fable. She’d said all those phone calls to Stefano were for tree trimming, and I’d said the same, following her lead. That was Stefano’s day job—a laborer at a tree-trimming company—so when she was asked about the string of calls, she’d claimed she’d hired him “under the table” to clean up some overgrown branches. It was the kind of work she couldn’t have her sons do, since it required specialty saws and tools. That was all true and completely plausible.
And the tale seemed to work at first for both Stefano and my mom. For a brief while, their story did the trick. Botched robbery—that was how the murder looked to authorities, and Stefano seemed clean. My mother seemed clean. Some unknown assailant had tried to rob my father and killed him instead, the cops had believed.
It was on its way to becoming an unsolved murder.
Until the detectives found Stefano’s fingerprints on the gun he’d disposed of. The gun the cops found.
Everything turned with that tide.
There was no botched robbery in the driveway.
Because Stefano confessed.
He started singing about how he’d been hired for much more than tree trimming.
Stefano served it all up, and the lies he and my mother had concocted unraveled.
He told the cops he’d been contracted to kill. He said the calls to my mother weren’t to cut overgrown branches—they were to plan the murder of my father and to make it look like a robbery gone wrong. He alleged he’d been promised 10 percent of Thomas Paige’s life insurance policy if he pulled it off.
The life insurance company went next, supplying more evidence. They confirmed that Dora had called a few months before the death to make a “routine check” on the beneficiary information on behalf of her husband, then again six days after the murder to try to liquidate the funds.
All the dominoes fell in her direction, pointing clearly at her.
In her defense, she’d maintained her husband had asked her to check on the policy and that was why she’d phoned the company months before his death. For him, she’d said. He was busy working and asked her to check up on various pieces of paperwork. As for accessing the payout, she pointed out that if she’d killed him for money, wouldn’t she have called hours later for the cash? No, she’d waited a week.
A week. She hung her hope on a timeline.
The jury didn’t buy it.
She could have admitted to the drugs then, but it was too late for her. The case was so far beyond drugs. The state had Stefano and his testimony, they had the life insurance proof, and they had circumstantial evidence—she was having an affair at the time of the murder.
They had her, beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury said.
Admitting to drug buying and using, to money owed to dealers, wouldn’t have done a damn thing to change the fate of either Stefano or my mom.
“Don’t mention the drugs,” she’d begged me before she left for Stella McLaren Federal Women’s Correctional Center. “It won’t make a difference now. I will keep fighting to be free, and it will look worse for me if this gets out. I’ll try to find a way to get the guys who really did it. I have to take the fall now, but please know I will be appealing. I will do everything I can to be with my children again.”
I did as she asked—I protected her lies.
But now, eighteen goddamn years later, why was Luke still covering everything up?
I shrugged off his grip, my jaw tight, my hackles raised. “Luke, let’s get real here. Let go of the song and dance. The lies didn’t work.” I licked my lips, drew in a breath, and asked the question I needed to know the answer to. “So why are you protecting Stefano?”
“I’m not protecting Jerry,” Luke said in a wild hiss, pointing to the door, waving desperately beyond. “I’m protecting my family—my wife and kids—from Stefano’s friends on the outside. His friends protected him, Ryan. That’s what a Royal Sinner does. The goddamn ink on their arms says that. Protect Our Own. He has friends who have been looking out for his interests, and I am not about to serve up any more details on him and have those friends come after my family now.” Luke rubbed a hand across his jaw, glanced away, then turned his gaze back to me. His eyes were softer now, and in them I read honesty, truth. I hated it, but that’s what I saw. “Look, I made some mistakes when I was a younger man. I made some terrible mistakes. I left town to start fresh after Dora was gone. Moved to San Diego and met my wife there. We returned to Vegas five years ago. My job now is to protect my family, and Jerry Stefano is not a man to be messed with, so I never talked then and I don’t intend to now. He told us to never say a word, so I didn’t. He made it clear the people we loved would get hurt. That’s why your mother kept it quiet, and that’s why I did too. I love too many people to take that chance.”
I sighed heavily, a long, deep, frustrated sound filled with years of regret, years of anger, years of locking up all these awful secrets.
There wasn’t much else to say. He had nothing more. And I was in the same damn boat too.
I thanked him and headed to the front door. On the way, I spotted a framed wedding photo of Luke and his wife. The man didn’t look much younger than he did today. I peered at it. “How long have you been married?”
Luke glanced sheepishly at the floor. “Only a year. But we’ve been together for a lot longer. Anyway, don’t tell the church I had kids out of wedlock.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I said, wishing it were the only secret I shared with this man.
As I headed for my truck ready to hit the road to Hawthorne, a fresh wave of loathing rolled through me. I was in a pact with the man who’d fucked my mother behind my father’s back.
The one bright spot was the message on my phone from Sophie.
27
Sophie
Red. Ripe. Juicy.
The peaches looked mouthwateringly good.
“One pound of peaches coming right up.”
“Thank you, Marietta,” I said, flashing a bright smile at my favorite employee at my parents’ former fruit stand at the farmers’ market.
“You will love these. They’re divine. My God, they melt in your mouth—and in a peach pie,” Marietta said, bringing her fingers to her lips and pressing a kiss to them before setting to work bagging up my fruit.
“Nothing is ever as good as a pie made with summer peaches kissed by the sun,” I said as I pushed my big white sunglasses on top of my head.
“How’s John doing?”
“You know John. He’s as busy as ever. Work, work, work. And he has these dang termites, so he’s been staying at my place. Talk about cramping my style,” I said in a faux whisper. “But he’ll be gone tomorr
ow night. So I think . . .” I trailed off to tap my nails against the red-checkered cloth that covered the table filled with baskets of peaches, cherries, plums, and all sorts of summer fruit. “I might invite over this man I’ve been seeing.”
Marietta wiggled her thick black eyebrows as she wiped a hand across her apron. “You know that’s how your mom wooed your dad,” she said, winking.
“Oh, stop.”
The woman nodded enthusiastically. “It’s true. She lured him with a pineapple. You’ve got peaches.”
“How many times did my parents tell you that story?”
“Countless,” she said with a laugh, then tapped the counter. My parents had operated this fruit stand for many years, and Marietta had taken it over when they died. “This stand has some sort of magic to it. I met my husband here too, and we’re going on twenty-five years.”
“The magic of fruit,” I quipped, then stopped for a second to gaze heavenward. “You know, maybe that’s why I have so many dresses with fruit patterns.”
“You’re trying to attract love,” Marietta said. “Draw it to you. I think that’s brave and hopeful.”
“Is it crazy?”
Marietta shook her head. “Nothing is ever crazy when it involves love,” she said, handing me a sturdy brown paper bag. “Go make a peach pie. It’s always the way to a man’s heart.”
That made me hopeful, so I sent Ryan a teaser.
My Sinful Desire (Sinful Men Book 2) Page 13
