The Ultimate Romantic Suspense Set (8 romantic suspense novels from 8 bestselling authors for 99c)

by Lee Taylor

  Jim laughed, but quickly sobered. "Which is more than can be said for many elderly people."

  Michael's interest in elder abuse and his long friendship with Jim had led to this permanent assignment to the Ministry. The instances of seniors being abused were on the rise in British Columbia, as they were globally, and the government had adopted a more aggressive investigative stance.

  That brought his thoughts back to his report. "Gotta get this done today. Gary and I leave tomorrow."

  Jim nodded. "Of course. I forgot you're going on vacation. Panama--right? Maybe that's why you're so distracted?"

  Better he think that! "Yeah. Sorry about that. My brother claims Panama's the place to go, and he's paying, in anticipation of a client's big sale to a publisher, so--"

  "Okay, in that case, bring me up to speed first on the Glazebrook investigation, then if something develops while you're gone, I'll be able to respond accordingly."

  Glad to postpone delivery of the report of today's arrests, Michael reached into his pocket to retrieve his small spiral notebook. No hi-tech gizmo for him. Pen and paper had served well enough throughout his career as a detective with Victoria PD. Michael flipped the notebook to the back where he kept all his notes on the case Jim referred to. "Let's see. Philip Irving Glazebrook. P-I-G for short. No solid leads yet, but that slippery character will get what he deserves one day."

  Jim shifted in his chair. "Just be careful. He's powerful. Lots of connections."

  "Yeah, well, the bigger they are--"

  Jim nodded. "You've been at this for months."

  Michael heard the doubt in Jim's voice. If he didn't insist, the case might be quietly dropped. "He's a high profile member of the Hospital Board who, over the last two years, has acquired and quickly resold numerous valuable properties. The prices he paid were ridiculously low. All the homes belonged to elderly widows with no family, every one of them institutionalised with dementia."

  Jim rotated his chair from side to side. "But he's a lawyer, Michael, a member of an old and well respected family, part of Victoria's elite."

  Michael chewed his lower lip. "Something about him and the whole scenario doesn't sit right. Now he's renovating a recently purchased property in Rockland--making part of it into his offices. The house is a rare Maclure design worth a fortune. Glazebrook got it for a pittance. And nobody seems to know what's happened to the former owner, Matilda Johnson.

  "Maybe while I'm away you can get someone to try and track her down. I've spoken with neighbors. She doesn't fit the normal profile of Glazebrook's prey."

  Jim typed on his keyboard. "I've made a note. I assume you've got all her vital stats in the computer? I'll get Blenkin on it. Now, tell me about today's events, or you'll be here pecking at your keyboard until midnight."

  Reluctantly, Michael flipped to the relevant page, wishing he could forget what he'd seen earlier. "The police have arrested Richard Hartley, age 57." He looked up at Jim. "Our Mr. Hartley is a prize specimen."

  Jim steepled his hands. "What's the charge?"

  "Aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult. He's in the Wilkinson Road lock-up."

  "Go on."

  "We received a call from a concerned neighbor about obnoxious odors. Based on that, I despatched firefighters from the View Royal station. I went with them because we had suspicions about that family. The Public Health nurse reported a few days ago she hasn't been able to get access to the house. It worried her because the patient's MS is severe. She got the feeling someone was home but they weren't coming to the door. I called the police as soon as we entered the place."

  "The stink?"

  Michael's gut tightened. He'd gone home to shower right after, but somehow couldn't get the smell out of his nostrils. "Enough to make you heave."

  He consulted his notebook, noticing a faint trace of the sickening odor lingering in its pages. He'd have to replace it. "Myra Hartley, 56, the moron's wife, is bedridden with multiple sclerosis. The paramedic firefighter diagnosed a severe infection. She had open sores, and was covered from head to toe in her own waste."

  He paused, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair, trying to steady his breathing. "She sobbed uncontrollably when we found her. It's a good thing the police took the husband away. I was tempted to knee him in the balls--except he probably doesn't have any."

  He consulted his notes again, trying to bring his anger under control. "The paramedic gave me a list of Mrs. Hartley's problems." His throat constricted. He couldn't continue. Instead he handed the notes to Jim, watching his boss's disbelief grow as he scanned the horrific details.

  "Hell! Glad I wasn't there," Jim rasped, passing the notebook back.

  Michael had a feeling the tender-hearted Jim would have gotten violent, or passed out from the stench. "I followed up at the hospital. Their report was even worse."

  "This is the man's wife?" Jim asked incredulously. "What did he have to say for himself?"

  Michael closed his notebook. "He just shrugged and asked what we expected him to do, as if we were talking about a stray dog. He was living with the stench. I guess pigs can't smell their own sty."

  Jim leaned back again. "Well, it goes to show this agency is desperately needed. Good work, Michael. Have you spoken to other family members?"

  "Yeah. The adult children told me that their father had, let's see, how did they put it, ‘isolated their mother from them.'"

  Jim shook his head. "In other words, they couldn't be bothered to make sure she was okay. Think of it this way, Michael. You rescued her. Without your intervention she'd still be in that hell-hole."

  Michael tucked the notebook back in his pocket, wishing he had a plastic baggie. He'd have to get the leather jacket cleaned. Maybe he could drop it off on the way to his sister's tonight. Sure wouldn't need it in Panama.

  He glanced back at the window. Why did people treat their loved ones with such unbelievable cruelty? He understood the deep-seated need to dominate a woman, but he wanted the control to be freely given.

  Pray to God his emerging Dom side never took hold of him to the point where he might hurt someone he loved.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "You're obsessed with sex!"

  Curled up comfortably in the green microfiber recliner in her living room, Jessie Halliwell stared at the hastily scrawled words on the first line of the front page of her new leather-bound journal. The book's innocence was gone, stolen by a few strokes of the pen.

  Half her brain registered that her handwriting had deteriorated; the other half was shocked by the naked honesty of what she'd written.

  According to the author of a book on journaling she'd picked up from Russell's bookstore, having a chat with yourself on paper was therapeutic.

  But what had possessed her to write such a confession, without any hesitation, on the very first line? Maybe writing in pencil was a better idea, but finding a pencil was probably a lost cause. There were one or two moving boxes still to be unpacked, but it was unlikely they contained pencils. KITCHEN was scrawled on all sides in permanent black marker.

  She'd spent the day emptying box after box, deciding where to put things in her new one bedroom apartment. It seemed cramped after the spaciousness of the bungalow she'd lived in for ten years.

  Might as well accept reality. The house had to go if she wanted to survive, and she was relieved it had sold quickly in a depressed market. The Taiwanese buyers had been only too happy to include most of her furniture. No room for it here. It had taken the movers only half a day to carry in the remaining stuff, one advantage of being on the ground floor.

  Camden Manor was a classy apartment building in Rockland, an old, upscale neighborhood in Victoria. It was only streets away from the Lieutenant Governor's mansion and the impressive Craigdarroch Castle, once home to 19th century coal baron, Robert Dunsmuir.

  Maybe someday she'd be able to move up to one of the four exclusive penthouse suites atop her building. They boasted a fabulous view and secure indoor parking, unlike th
is dark, poky place on the ground floor at the back. There was at least a faint hope of that now she had a new source of unexpected income.

  Bone tired, she'd slumped into the recliner intending to write in her new journal before she dropped from exhaustion. Today was a new beginning. It should be recorded.

  But the idea of using the journal as a diary of events seemed to have gone awry. Turning her attention back to the book, she added two more exclamation marks to the surprising sentence she'd written. The strident symbols were strangely satisfying. She enlarged the first one to make them match, twirled her pen to enlarge the periods, and then underlined the words.

  "There."

  What to write in response? That was easy. "You've tormented yourself too often with this scolding. Give it a rest."

  Not good enough. "But I'm too old to be preoccupied with endless thoughts of steamy intercourse."

  A flush of heat crept from her face to her breasts. She made a mental note to always stash the journal where no one would ever find it. Not that anyone else was likely to be around. She'd have to make a provision in her will that all journals be destroyed unread.

  Now she was getting ahead of herself. Her adult children wouldn't take the time to read them after she was gone. Still--

  Time to get back on track. "Neither of my husbands made the earth move."

  She chewed the end of the pen before writing her next thoughts. "My first husband, the father of my children, was gentle but inexperienced, the second too full of himself. As the years of mediocre lovemaking dragged on, I tried to avoid the act more and more and certainly never initiated it."

  She pushed the lever to raise the foot rest and settled back, staring at the ceiling.

  Orgasms? Yes, she'd experienced them. Her clit could respond as well as any to stimulation (at one time anyway). But earth-shattering, mind-boggling rapture--these weren't descriptions she could apply to her orgasms. Pleasant was more like it.

  Deciding there and then never to record anything about orgasms, she bent her knees to rest the journal on her thighs. "I've become a voracious reader of romance novels, the more erotic the better. Thanks to my Kindle addiction I trawl the mighty Amazon for the book cover with the most muscled hunk. Maybe it's early onset Alzheimer's."

  Jessie chuckled at that. "Perhaps. Not only do I spend too much time reading love stories, I've written one, and His Willing Slave has sold in the thousands.

  "What would my parents think?"

  She slammed the journal shut. Damn it! That question had come too quickly. It was true she'd waited until both her parents were dead to write smut--make that erotic romance.

  It was a paradox. The thought of embarking on a new sexual relationship filled her with dread. How to explain the physical realities of a close to fifty-year old female body, especially the inability to climax unless a million things were just so, and Mercury and Venus were in alignment. Was that cellulite rearing its ugly head at the top of her thighs?

  Oh God! None of those thoughts were going into the journal either. The whole idea was a waste of time.

  She closed her eyes and pursed her lips. The journaling expert had warned it might not be easy.

  Opening her eyes, she discovered the pen had fallen to the carpet. She bent over to retrieve it, feeling like a beached whale when her core muscles refused to cooperate.

  For God's sake, I'm so out of shape.

  Panting, she clutched the ballpoint and leaned back in the recliner. A journal is supposed to be a place to confide innermost feelings. Here goes, then.

  "I long for an erotic, passionate relationship with an attractive, fit and virile male. Hah! How many of those in my age bracket? The men I know are paunchy, bald(ing), have bad breath, or are married. There are men I like, get along with and respect--but physical attraction? Nope!

  "Better to accept reality. I was nineteen when I first married. I thought my desire to be fondled and suckled was perhaps an aberration, so kept quiet about it."

  Jessie grimaced at the memories. If only she'd been a reader of romance novels then. They should be required reading for any new bride and groom, part of every church's marriage course. What can newly-weds learn about sexual intimacy from a priest?

  "After my divorce, I decided I needed a passionate lover."

  In hindsight, that was a depressing thought.

  "I believed I'd found one in my second husband, but could I have picked a man more focussed on his own penis? Well endowed?--oh baby! Tall, definitely dark and (at one time) handsome. But arrogant and lazy--things I didn't notice (or chose to ignore) until he'd spent his way through most of my money. Barely enough left to pay for the divorce."

  She paused, wondering idly what (or who) her second husband was doing now. Had he gone back to Eastern Europe? She'd been doodling at the side of the page, her eyes fluttering closed as exhaustion took hold. She yawned, irritated when she realized she'd drawn a big penis in the margin, fully erect.

  Aargh! Focus!

  She stared at the ceiling again, mesmerized by the white overhead fan twirling silently. Life was ebbing away with every turn, one day blurring into the next.

  "If I was honest with myself, I'd admit why I wrote an erotic romance about Dominants and Submissives, when I know nothing of the lifestyle except what I've read.

  "Because those are the books I enjoy. Okay, they turn me on."

  She tapped her pursed lips with the pen, then wrote: "I want a gentle, caring man who'll dominate me sexually, a man like James, the hero of my book. That's why I created him. He's a Dom in the bedroom, but Susan is his equal in everything else they do. She gives him power over her. They complement each other.

  "Any chance of finding him at the Club?

  "Not likely. I went to Scallywags a couple of times to do research for my first book. They're a great bunch of people, surprisingly, and interviewing them helped a lot with the details of the characters, but--"

  Jessie put the pen down. Maybe another, more in-depth research trip to Scallywags would be a good idea for the second book--a more "hands on" experience.

  A shiver stole up her spine. Seeing a woman fastened to a St. Andrew's Cross at the club had nauseated her. Bondage wasn't an appealing idea. Neither was being flogged, though the woman in the scene she'd watched seemed to be enjoying it thoroughly.

  It was a lost cause. She wanted a Dom who wasn't into bondage and pain. No such animal existed except in her imagination. In fact, the whole idea of being Submissive to a Dominant was crazy. Much too scary.

  If by some miracle she did enter into a new relationship, odds were she'd pick the wrong person, again. And choosing the wrong Dom--eek!

  "I should be over the moon with the success of my writing career. Thanks to Amazon, I've been able to publish my book independently and have it for sale on their sites worldwide. Instead of years of rejection letters, I've let readers decide whether they like my work or not. And they do!

  "The book's sales caught the attention of a New York publisher. They've already sent out proof copies and now they're offering a whopping advance for a second novel."

  She drew a smiley face.

  Her overnight success had been the talk of the publishing world, thanks largely to her agent, Gary Atherton. She should be happy and she was, but she was also lonely.

  "I guess I'll slip gracefully into old age, content with my sex toy and make-believe relationships with the heroes of my books."

  Another thought occurred. "It's not really a sex toy, just--"

  She obliterated the last partial sentence with several vigorous strokes of the pen, almost tearing a hole in the paper.

  Underneath she wrote, "After my first marriage ended, my mother gave me a medallion engraved with the reassurance, Every Ending Is a New Beginning."

  She glanced around the darkening room, swallowing the lump in her throat before writing, "Is another new beginning possible?"

  CHAPTER THREE

  "To you, my dear," Gary Atherton crowed, clinking his ch
ampagne flute against Jessie's.

  She smiled and took a sip of the expensive bubbly Gary had insisted on ordering. It seemed a bit over the top to be sitting in a booth at Romeo's Pizzeria drinking champagne. She'd never really liked the stuff.

  A young couple at a nearby table smiled knowingly, raising their glasses in salute.

  God, I hope they don't think we're two old fogies celebrating an engagement or something.

  She wrinkled her nose and held up her glass again, trying to look business-like. "And here's to you, with my thanks for doing a great job as my agent. When I first decided to take the plunge and publish independently, I thought it would be wonderful to sell a hundred books in a year."

  Gary chuckled. "You've sold a hell of a lot more than that."

  "I know. I can still scarcely believe it. But I never would have had my lucrative deal if you hadn't pushed so hard."

  Gary drained his glass. She half expected to hear a sucking sound. "Nonsense. Your work is brilliant. I didn't have to do any arm twisting. They'd already noticed you. You're unique--you made your hero very appealing sexually, although he's an older man."

  He wiggled his eyebrows while pouring himself another glass of bubbly. "After all, most readers of the genre are older women."

  He poised the bottle over her half empty glass. "A touch more?"

  Jessie didn't know if Gary was married but she got the feeling the guy was flirting a little. He was a nice man and she owed him big time, but he didn't arouse her at all. Her dream man was fit and healthy looking. Gary was neither.

  She put her hand over the top of the glass. "No thanks. I've never acquired a taste for it."

  He wagged a finger, then shoved the last piece of his pizza into his mouth. "Get used to it," he said between chews. "This is just the beginning."

  She smiled, pushing her plate aside.

  Gary reached for the last slice of pizza she was too full and too nervous to eat. "You're not gonna eat that?" He had it half way to his mouth before she could tell him he was welcome to it.

  Their waitress came along as he was moving the plates and cutlery to one side of the table, clearing a space. He winked at Jessie as the server removed the dishes. "Down to business," he declared.