by Julie Kriss
That made her smile. She pushed back her chair and stood up. “So long, Devon,” she said. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
“Likewise,” I said.
She came around the table and put her hands on my face, tilting my chin up. Her touch was cool. She kissed me on the cheek.
“See you around,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. And then she was gone.
I sat, staring at the water again and thinking about everything she’d told me. I had to make some calls.
I couldn’t think about Olivia in my bedroom this morning, in my bed, the bruises on her face. You promised me. She was right; part of me might long to snap Craig Bastien’s neck for what he’d done to her, but I was no good to anyone on Death Row. I had to rein in my temper. I had to be cool.
She didn’t think I could do it. She saw a thug, a getaway driver, a con, a man who had lived by his wits all his life. She wanted to believe in me, but I saw the doubt in her eyes. She was trying to reconcile the man she was looking at—big, brawny, furious—with the man I was with her.
It killed me. But I knew what I had to do. I’d never had a purpose the way I did for the next few hours, when I was going to put my plan in motion. I was going to do this if I died doing it. If it was, literally, the last thing I’d ever do.
I could be a good person. I could maybe even be the man Olivia wanted me to be, the man she deserved. But there was still poison in my veins, and I had to get rid of it. I had to clean the shit out of my life before I could be free to build a new one.
I paid the bill and watched the water for a while, and then I pulled out my phone.
Twenty-Four
Olivia
When I came downstairs, showered and dressed, there was a man in the kitchen. He had pulled up a stool to the high kitchen counter and was busy digging into a takeout container with a pair of chopsticks. He wore jeans, motorcycle boots, and a black t-shirt with a classic Metallica logo on it. His dark blond hair was worn slightly long, swept back behind his ears and touching the back of his neck, and he had a short beard on his face.
He looked up at me when I entered and his blue-gray eyes lit into me like lasers. “Don’t call 911,” he said. “I’m Ben.”
I stopped in the kitchen doorway. “The lawyer?”
“The same.” He put down his chopsticks, slid off his stool, and held out a hand to me. His arm was roped with muscles and he had a leather bracelet on one wrist. “Ben Hanratty.”
He doesn’t look like a lawyer, Devon had said. That was an understatement. “Olivia Maplethorpe,” I said, shaking his hand.
He grinned at me. His grip was warm and kind, his hand enveloping mine before he pulled away. “I know. Is your mom still sexy?”
I coughed. “Um, I suppose. I don’t think of her that way.”
“Avery’s Place,” Ben said, getting on his stool again. He whistled appreciatively. “What a beautiful woman. I had plenty of happy daydreams about Avery back in the day, let me tell you. I put some coffee on. You want some tofu?”
He looked older than Devon, in his thirties maybe. If my mother knew this man thought she was sexy, she would probably be so flattered she’d float straight off the floor. I eyed the contents of his takeout container warily, then moved to the coffeepot. “No tofu, thank you.”
“Let me guess,” Ben said good-naturedly, poking at the rice in his container deftly, his big fingers wrapped around his chopsticks. “You don’t think I look like a lawyer, and you don’t think I look like a guy who eats tofu. But it’s my day off, so I left my suit and tie at home. And I actually like tofu.”
I pulled a mug from the cupboard. “I like surprises,” I said.
“Then I guess Devon really is the man for you.” He didn’t notice when I froze awkwardly at the words.
I poured my coffee, being careful with my bandaged wrist, and turned to stare at him as I sipped it. Sure, he didn’t look like a lawyer, but he looked like a man capable of kicking the ass of anyone who tried to throw me down another flight of stairs. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have a guy who looked like the president of the local MC sitting at the breakfast bar. “You’re really Devon’s lawyer?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. He glanced at me. “I know his situation looks fucked up on the surface. Do you have any questions?”
I blinked. “You mean, about the inheritance?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “I’ll answer anything you want.”
“What about lawyer-client privilege?”
He turned over a cube of tofu with his chopsticks and regarded me thoughtfully. “I’ve known Devon for eight years,” he said, “ever since he came to the age of majority. Do you know how many women he’s introduced me to?”
My spine went tight. “No.”
“Zero,” Ben said. He held up his thumb and finger in a circle for emphasis. “Exactly none. And then he calls me up and says you’re in his house, and he needs me to look out for you until he gets home, because some asshole threw you down a flight of stairs. And that whole sentence sounded incredible, but the most incredible thing to me was that Devon Wilder had a woman in his house. I didn’t even register the rest of it at first. You get me?” He watched my confused face. “There has never been a man who is more of a loner than Devon. He has Max at his back, and me dealing with his legal shit, and that’s it. He has no one else. So to me, if you’re here, then I can tell you anything. Because if Devon didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be here at all.”
I digested that. Do you trust me? Devon had asked me this morning. And I’d told him that I didn’t think he trusted me. But this man knew something very, very different.
“It’s really for real?” I asked Ben. “The dead grandfather, the whole thing? It isn’t going to just disappear?”
Ben ate some more tofu. “The grandfather is definitely dead,” he said, “and his money is definitely Devon’s. Except for Cavan, assuming Cavan is still alive, there’s no one else with a claim. It’s one hundred percent. Devon is a legit billionaire.”
I slammed my mug down as coffee burned its way down my throat. “A billionaire?”
“He didn’t tell you that part, huh?” Ben said. “Yeah, he is. If you factor in the value of the properties and a bunch of other things.”
“Oh, my God.” I inhaled a breath, trying not to vomit coffee. “He told me it was a lot of money. I thought—I didn’t—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ben said. “This is Devon. He has his head screwed on straight. If anyone can make good of a billion bucks, it’s him.”
“Do you know where he went today?” I asked. “Why someone attacked me last night? Do you know what’s going on?”
“He didn’t tell me,” Ben said, “but I can guess. It probably has to do with one of the pieces of dogshit he used to work for before his prison stretch. If one of those ass pimples smells money, they’re going to come after it any way they can.”
“They want him to be part of some kind of drug deal.”
“Then they’re going to learn a really hard lesson really fast.” Ben pushed his takeout container away and looked at me, folding his big, elegant hands. “You’re worried about him,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Of course I’m worried. He just got out of prison.”
He seemed to consider this. “That isn’t it,” he said thoughtfully. “Or not all of it, anyway. This whole thing has thrown you. You seem to be kind of freaking out.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Because he was right. It wasn’t a big, noisy, dramatic production, but deep inside I was quietly freaking out. “I’m just an average person,” I said. “I don’t know anything about billionaires or drug deals.”
Ben scratched his beard. I realized it had threads of gray mixed in with the dark blond, though he wasn’t yet forty. I had to admit the contrast was unusually attractive. “Everyone is average until they’re not,” he said. “I met Devon when he was eighteen. I wasn’t a lawyer then, but my dad was,
and I volunteered with him in the legal aid office. Devon came in as this punk kid, surly and full of attitude. Just another street kid. He wanted out from under the foster system because he was of age.”
“He told me he never went into the foster system. That he ran away after his mother’s murder.”
For the first time, I had completely surprised Ben. He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “He told you about that?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” He scratched his beard again. “Holy shit.” He was really amazed. “I haven’t heard Devon actually talk about that since the first day I met him. Just once, in that legal aid office, and never again. Max never talks about it, either.”
“Max?” I asked, recalling that was Devon’s book-loaning friend.
“Max was his friend then. Through the whole thing. They caught the boyfriend pretty quickly, and it wasn’t much of a trial, but it was still bad. Max went into the military as soon as he was old enough. Cavan just packed his bags and disappeared. And Devon lived on the streets and started driving.” He shrugged. “My point is that life doesn’t always let you be average. It doesn’t let you just live a quiet, unexciting life. In fact, it rarely does. So you have to decide, when the shit happens—whatever it is—exactly how you’re going to rise to the occasion. You know?”
I stared at him for a minute. I had the sneaking suspicion he was lecturing me. “I bet you have your own not-so-boring story,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re right, but it isn’t very cheerful,” he said. “It sucks. I’ll tell you some other time. You want to go to the movies?”
I shifted my weight. I didn’t think I could sit through a movie and concentrate. My head was spinning, my stomach in knots. At the same time, I couldn’t just sit in this house all day, waiting. I already knew that.
And suddenly I had a clear plan. “Okay,” I said. “Just let me go get ready.”
Ben shrugged. “Take your time.”
I left the kitchen and walked to the front hall. My purse was there, where I’d left it when Devon brought me home last night. I thought of it with a pang, him coming to get me, the worry on his face, how gently he’d handled me. It had taken a lot out of him, I realized that now. He had been wound up, upset, his instinct to growl and rage and throw things. But he had put me first instead.
And now? I didn’t know what he was doing. I didn’t know what the future held, even over the next few hours. I didn’t know what we were anymore. And I knew we were lost not because of him, but because of me. Because I wasn’t sure.
I slipped on the sandals I’d been wearing last night. Then instead of walking back to the kitchen, I walked to the side hall. To the door that led to the garage.
I slipped through it as quietly as I could. There, on the hook next to the door, were the car keys. I found the key for the Mercedes. I hit the button for the automatic garage door opener.
Then I got into the Mercedes, started it up, and backed down the driveway. No one came after me. Ben didn’t come out of the house, shouting. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he knew there was no point. Or maybe he wasn’t even surprised.
I backed onto the street, turned the car, and drove out of Diablo.
Twenty-Five
Devon
The man I was supposed to meet didn’t look like a criminal. He didn’t look like he worked for a major drug cartel. They hadn’t sent me the top guy; that would have been bad business. But they sent me a guy who was pretty high up. I could tell.
I was in a café on the harbor, this time in Mission Bay, sitting at a table by the window. I was doing all of my meetings by the ocean today. Because I was thinking about the ocean, and boats. And shipments.
I checked my phone. I had no calls. Not Olivia, not Ben. Not even a text. I couldn’t allow myself to worry, not right now. I had to have my game face on. I put my phone away and looked out the window again.
A man approached my elbow, pulled out a chair next to me, and sat down. “So,” he said in a soft voice. “You got the meeting you wanted. Talk.”
I glanced over at him, but only briefly. He wouldn’t want me to look too close. He was a nondescript man, white, maybe fifty, with dark eyes and still-dark hair that said maybe he was crossed with some other heritage. It didn’t matter.
“I have a proposition for you and your boss,” I said.
The man’s voice was still calm. “I don’t do business with you, friend, and I never have. If you are wasting my time, the men I work for are not going to be happy. You should be very aware of that before you start.”
I sipped my coffee and watched the tourists go by. “I never waste time,” I said. And then I told him what I wanted.
The man was quiet for a minute. “What you’re asking to buy is very expensive,” he said.
“I have the money.”
“It’s a big shipment,” he said. “Quite a bit of merchandise. Very expensive, as I say. And you want to buy the whole thing?”
“All of it.”
“We own the boat, too. And the crew aboard. What about those?”
“I’ll buy the boat and the crew. Name a price.”
The man shook his head. “You are not going to like this number, my friend. I have a feeling we’re going to discover you were wasting my time after all.”
I set my jaw hard. “Name it.”
I heard him sigh. I hadn’t yet seen him look at me, not even once. “In order to hand over the entire shipment,” he said, “including the boat it’s loaded on and the crew driving it, my organization would have to ask for twenty million.”
If it hadn’t been entirely inappropriate—and if it wouldn’t get me killed—I would have laughed. Twenty million. Exactly the amount of cash my banker had said he could raise for me. Liquid capital, I thought.
“I can do it,” I said.
The man sighed again. “If you are lying, my friend, you won’t live to explain it.”
“Name the time and the place,” I said. “I’ll give you your money. I want that boat.”
The man named a place, a closed-down warehouse on the outskirts of town. “You have two hours.” And then he was gone.
I sat staring at the water. Two hours. He was trying to test me, trying to make me fail so they would be justified in killing me. But I would do it. I would meet them and give them their money. And then our business would be done forever.
Or I’d show up with all that money and they’d kill me. Either one.
My heart wasn’t even racing. I thought again of Olivia being thrown down those stairs, calling me from the hospital lobby alone and afraid, her wrist sprained and bruises on her face. I was cool, but the fire still burned. I was still furious. Craig Bastien was going down.
My phone rang, and I pulled it from my pocket. Ben. “What’s up?” I asked, answering it.
“Devon,” he said. “She took off. She’s gone.”
My spine turned to ice. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”
“When my back was turned, she went into the garage and grabbed the keys to one of Graham’s old cars. She drove off. I didn’t even know those old cars ran.”
Fuck. I’d fixed it myself, with no idea that I was giving Olivia Maplethorpe a getaway car. “The Mercedes,” I told him. “I fixed the engine.”
“I’m sorry, man,” Ben said.
“What the hell did you say to her?”
“Nothing, I swear.” Ben paused. “I can see why you like her. She’s smart. Sexy, too.”
“Shut up.” Why were my friends all such assholes?
“Just telling it like I see it. But she seemed a little overwhelmed right now. That wrist bandage, those bruises on her face—no wonder you went ballistic. I felt like punching someone, myself.”
I closed my eyes briefly. I couldn’t lose it, not now. There was too much at stake. “So she just took the car and bailed?”
“Pretty much. Do you want me to go after her?”
I’d known Ben a long time, and I knew that
tone in his voice. He would do it if I asked, but that tone said You’re an idiot if you tell me to go after her. It was an effective skill for a lawyer, to say one thing while clearly meaning something else.
What I wanted was to get in my own car and go after her. She’d probably gone to her apartment at Shady Oaks, at least as a first stop. I could track her down there. If I missed her, I could make educated guesses about where she went next. I could get her sister’s address, her mother’s address. It would be one of those two. My bet would be the sister. I’d never met the sister, but I knew her name was Gwen and she worked as a strip-o-gram girl. Gwen Maplethorpe, stripper, would not be very hard to find. And my car was fast.
But Ben was right. If I went after Olivia, especially in this mood I was in right now, she wouldn’t welcome it. I would fuck it up. And if I fucked it up now, after our near-fight this morning, I might lose her forever.
I closed my eyes again. Do what my body was telling me to do—go after her—or do what my reluctant gut was telling me to do, and let her go. I couldn’t lose her. Not now, not ever. Which meant I’d have to make the sacrifice.
Besides which, I needed to get to the bank and cash out twenty million dollars in the next two hours, or my good friend from the drug cartel would see my brains splattered on the street. And Olivia would be next.
Fuck. Get it together, Wilder.
Fuck.
“Let her go,” I said to Ben, the words grinding out of my throat. “She’s made it clear what she wants. There’s nothing I can do.”
“This isn’t over,” Ben said, his voice sympathetic. “She just needs time.”
I laughed, and the sound was bitter. “I should take advice on my love life from you?” Ben had been through the worst divorce of all time—his wife had cheated on him, then tried to take him for everything he had. She’d also stomped on his heart, since he’d been blindly in love with her almost right to the end. It was the kind of experience that could scar a guy for life.
