Dangerous Disguise

by Marie Ferrarella

  He’d never apologized for what he did before, never felt the need. But these were good people, he thought, and he had deceived them. In their place, he would have been just a furious. And yet, Joe just looked resigned. It was Maren who looked as if she was going to explode.

  Could he blame her? They’d made love together. What had to be going through her mind? He gave her the only excuse he could, and it sounded hollow. Flimsy. “It’s my job, Maren.”

  Her eyes widened in disbelief. Sarcasm dripped from her lips. “Oh, well, your job. I guess that makes everything all right as long as you were just doing your job.” Her eyes narrowed as she gave him a piercing look of disdain. “Isn’t that the excuse the SS officers used in World War II? Except they called it ‘following orders.’” She got into his face, her voice rising as her temper grew hotter. “Were you just following orders, Jared-if-that-is-your-real-name,” she mocked. And then she was shouting at him. “Did you get orders to ruin our lives?”

  It was Joe, of all people, who came to his defense, placing his hand gently over his daughter’s. “Maren, you’re not being fair.”

  She spun around to stare at Joe. “Oh, I’m not being fair? What about him?” She gestured angrily toward Jared, then turned her hurt on Joe. “What about you?”

  All her concern came pouring out. He’d kept this from her, living in danger like this, he’d kept it all from her. Why hadn’t they just picked up stakes and left? She would have gone with him. She wouldn’t have been alive if it hadn’t been for him. Didn’t he know she’d always be loyal to him no matter what? All she required was that he be honest with her.

  But honesty, it seemed, came at a premium these days. “Oh, Papa, how could you put yourself in harm’s way like this?”

  “Because I didn’t want anything happening to you. Without you, Maren, there is nothing.” He looked at Jared, “You said you had a deal?”

  Jared nodded. He needed to set things in motion to get these people into some kind of protective custody. But he knew that the D.A. wouldn’t go for it before he had the information everyone wanted. “Total immunity,” he repeated. “We can put you in the witness security program—”

  “No, I’m not hiding anymore,” Joe said. “Just put these guys away.” He pressed his lips together, thinking. “Your sister, she sharp?”

  Jared welcomed the momentary respite in a very tense situation. “Any sharper and she’d make you bleed.” He added fuel to the argument for compliance. “The D.A. is salivating to make his name on this. We just need some evidence.”

  “How much do you need?” Joe asked.

  Jared was aware that Maren stared at him. His discomfort level rose with every passing moment. “As much as you can give us. The last thirteen years would be good.”

  Joe nodded. “That’s about when Shepherd and his ‘invisible partner’ took over.” Joe had worked at Rainbow’s End for the past fifteen years, ever since he and Maren had come to Aurora. “They bought the place out from Eric Svenson.” Joe thought back. “Svenson sold out rather abruptly,” he recalled. “Looking back, he must have been pressured.”

  Jared debated giving the other man the information he’d just become privy to as he’d left Janelle’s office. “They found Eric Svenson’s body stuffed into an eighteen-gallon drum that washed ashore late Monday night.”

  Joe paled as the words sank in. He looked at Maren. “I’m sorry, baby, I should have never let you come to work here.”

  As if she could blame him for anything, she thought. It was just her anger over being duped that had had her lashing out before. That and her fear that something could have happened to Papa Joe. She laid her hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t know Shepherd had connections to the mob then, did you?” Joe shook his head. “Then you have got nothing to be sorry for.” Her eyes frosted over as she turned them toward Jared. “Unlike some people.”

  She had every right to be angry at him, but he needed to clear things up between them. “Maren—”

  Joe looked from his daughter to Jared. “I think you two need to talk this out. I’ll give you a minute alone,” Joe said, retreating.

  “I don’t want a minute alone with him,” Maren insisted. But Joe walked out of the room anyway. His footsteps faded down the hall.

  Jared tried again, but got no further than the first time. When he said her name, Maren whirled around to face him, nothing less than fury in her eyes. Her look forbade him to take another step toward her.

  “Was bedding me part of it?”

  The question stunned him. “No—”

  Again she wouldn’t let him finish. “Then I guess that was just a little bonus, a perk for a job convincingly done.”

  His father had once said he could charm birds out of the trees and into his hands. All that eluded him now. He had no idea how to get Maren to see his side of it. How to make her forgive him. He could only be honest with her.

  “Maren, I didn’t plan for any of this to happen.”

  “Oh, you didn’t, did you?” Disbelief echoed in her voice. “You didn’t ‘plan’ on this.” She fisted her hands at her waist only to keep from swinging them at him. “Was that why you were there at every turn, doing your damnedest to get me to open up to you?”

  She was backing him up into a corner, and he did his best to move out of the way. “That was part of the job, yes, but not the rest of it.”

  She didn’t believe him. Would never believe him—or any man again. Even Joe was on shaky grounds after the lie he’d been living. “Draw fine lines, do you? If it ‘wasn’t part of it’ then why did you make love with me?” she demanded.

  Though he was gregarious, he kept a part of himself in reserve. It was why he’d never gotten into a full, three-dimensional relationship with a woman. He took a chance and laid himself bare now. Risking it all. “Because if I didn’t, I was going to go insane.”

  The contemptuous look on her face told him he hadn’t been successful. “Is that anything like the Twinkies Defense?”

  He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. Instead he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and let his own temper flare. “Damn it, Maren, you have to believe me. What happened between us had nothing to do with my assignment.”

  She pretended to study him with unabashed awe. “Incredible. You can lie without flinching or blinking. That’s some talent you’ve developed.”

  He was reaching the end of his tether. “Look, you can believe me, or not believe me, but this isn’t how I operate. By the time you and I slept together, I knew you had nothing to do with what was going on.”

  A part of her, she realized in shame, wanted to believe him. But she couldn’t.

  “Oh? And how did you know?” she demanded hotly, beckoning him on with her hands as if urging him to move forward. “How were you so sure?”

  “Because I couldn’t have felt the way I did about you if you were guilty. Because I just would have known.” He hit his palm against the flat of his stomach. “In my gut, I would have known.”

  She struggled not to let the expression on his face get to her, not to allow his tone to undermine the anger she was nursing. Kirk had tried to win her back with lies, with protestations of being faithful only to have her catch him with someone else again. Even then, Kirk had felt he had a chance to win her back, that she would succumb to him because of his charm, his looks. The only way she’d truly gotten rid of him was when she’d told him she was carrying his baby. She’d never seen him after that.

  Jared made Kirk look like a choirboy.

  “Very good, very convincing,” she jeered, frantically placing roadblocks between them. Because even now, she wanted to throw herself into his arms and weep. “Too bad I can see through you.”

  “No,” he told her, his voice suddenly deadly calm, “you can’t. Because if you could, you’d know that I was telling the truth.”

  “The truth?” She hooted. “The truth? You’ve probably been doing this for so long, you wouldn’t know the truth if it bit y
ou on the rear,” she cried suddenly as he took a step toward her. “Don’t come near me, don’t touch me.” She uttered the warnings tersely, knowing that if he did touch her, she’d break down and she couldn’t afford to do that.

  Abruptly she opened the hall closet and grabbed her jacket and purse. “I’m going, Papa,” she called. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” And then she looked at Jared. “And you, I’ll see in hell.”

  “I doubt it,” he murmured to her retreating back. “It wouldn’t be a place where you’d be going.” But he would, he thought.

  Jared saw her falter for a second and knew she’d heard him. The next minute she was gone, holding his heart hostage.

  Chapter 14

  Jared grimly flipped closed his cell phone. That made a total of five calls to Joe in the last two hours that had gone unanswered. The alarm system within his head went off. Something was wrong.

  Without any further hesitation, he left his apartment, got into his car and drove to Joe’s house. At ten o’clock at night, the man had to be home. Joe had made a point of laughing about what a homebody he was.

  He’d called initially to tell Joe that he was going in tomorrow morning to give the D.A. the disk that Joe had made for him. The disk was a copy of all the accounting information Joe had pulled off both restaurant computers. On it was every monetary transaction the two branches of Rainbow’s End had made in the last fifteen years, going back to when Shepherd and the mythical Rineholdt had originally taken over. Davidson, the D.A., had told him he wanted Joe present along with the disk.

  Joe couldn’t be there if he didn’t know.

  Maybe he was getting concerned for no reason, Jared told himself, although when he got that itchy feeling at the back of his neck, he was rarely wrong.

  Still, playing the odds, he called Maren’s cell phone. Maybe the man was with her.

  Maren answered on the third ring. “Hi.”

  He knew the cheery tone he heard would vanish the moment he identified himself. She’d been downright frosty to him all day. Barely civil. Max had let some snide comment drop about there being “trouble in paradise.” Little did Max realize that this was going to be his last day.

  Jared knew it was going to take time for Maren to work through her anger. At least, he was hoping she’d work through it. Because he wasn’t about to let her just drop out of his life no matter what kind of a scum she thought he was now.

  “Maren, it’s Jared—don’t hang up,” he ordered, rightly anticipating her next move. “I’m looking for Joe. Is he there with you?” He’d tried to mask his concern.

  “No, why? Isn’t he home?”

  He stifled the impatience building inside him. As he gripped the wheel, he made a sharp right. “He’s not answering his phone. Maybe he just—”

  There was a dial tone in his ear. Maren had hung up. He didn’t have to guess where she was going. Throwing down the cell phone onto the passenger seat, Jared pressed down harder on the gas.

  Guilt and worry haunted him—and something else he wasn’t accustomed to besides these formless, unfamiliar feelings for Maren.

  Why wasn’t Joe answering his phone? Where the hell was he?

  The man had refused police protection, saying that would only attract Shepherd’s attention. The accountant, who had been exceptionally cool under fire, wanted things to remain “business as usual” until the trap was sprung. He’d slipped Jared the disk less than three hours ago, just before leaving. Something told Jared that he should have overridden the older man’s objections and had someone watching him anyway.

  Bending several speeding rules and breaking a few others, Jared reached Joe’s house just minutes before Maren did. At least something was going in his favor, he thought.

  His opinion began to turn as he pulled up at the curb. Joe’s car was parked in the driveway. In a New York minute, a sick feeling chewed a hole in the pit of his stomach. He sprinted to the front door. Not wasting any time knocking, he tried the knob. It gave, adding to his uneasiness.

  Jared braced himself and walked in.

  The house was completely trashed, as if a hurricane had passed through. Sofa, chairs and cushions were slashed, their guts spewed everywhere. The TV set had been unseated from its stand and lay facedown on the rug, smashed. Pictures had been thrown from walls, their frames broken and crippled.

  “Joe, Joe are you here?” he called.

  He didn’t see him at first.

  And then he realized that it wasn’t more debris lying on the floor at the center of the chaos. It was Joe. The man lay in a still, crumpled, bloodied heap, discarded like the rest the things in the room.

  Jared was instantly on his knees beside the man, unwilling to process what he saw. Unwilling to believe the man was dead. But Joe wasn’t moving, wasn’t moaning. Wasn’t making a sound. Praying, Jared felt the man’s throat for signs of a pulse.

  At first, there was none, but then he detected something. It was reedy, barely there, but at least there was a slight beat.

  Jared pulled out his cell phone. “You’re going to be okay, Joe, I promise.” Emotion threatened to cut off his voice.

  After getting the dispatcher, Jared identified himself and asked for an ambulance. He requested a forensic team, then gave the address.

  With a shaky sigh, Jared broke the connection as he looked down at Joe’s swollen, bloodied face. He thought of the disk that was locked away in his father’s safe at the police station.

  “They came here looking for it, didn’t they?” Guilt tore out another chunk. Joe’s attackers probably assumed the man was dead, and Jared prayed that they weren’t ultimately right. Shepherd and the people he was involved with were desperate. Would they go after Maren, too? She’d answered the phone when he’d called her, which meant she was all right. For now.

  God, he wished he’d never gotten them involved. Reminding himself of Joe’s involvement didn’t assuage what he was feeling.

  Joe was bleeding too much. The deep red pool around his body grew. Jared tore the bottom of his shirt, using the material to quickly bandage the wound on Joe’s forearm. He wanted to temporarily stem the flow of blood until the paramedics arrived.

  Squatting next to the man, anointed with Joe’s blood on his hands and clothing, he’d never felt so utterly helpless in his life. “Damn it, Joe, why didn’t you listen to me and let that policeman hang around? He could have stopped this from happening to you.”

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

  Jared’s head jerked up in time to see Maren cover her mouth with her hands, trying to stifle a scream. The next minute, she was rushing into the house.

  “Get away from him.” She physically pushed Jared out of the way and knelt beside Joe to take his place. “Haven’t you done enough?” She tried to cradle the unconscious man beside her. “Papa, talk to me. It’s Maren, please talk to me.”

  Jared refrained from pulling her away, from attempting to hold and comfort her because he knew it would only agitate her. “Maren, he can’t hear you.”

  “Yes, he can,” she insisted fiercely, because to believe otherwise would be to entertain the frightening possibility of Joe’s mortality. “He could always hear me. Even when I was away at school and I needed him, somehow, he’d always know and would call me.” She bent closer to his head. “Papa?” she whispered, trying not to choke on the tears in her throat.

  Sirens pierced the air. Pulling herself together, she sat upright.

  “I called the paramedics,” Jared said as the sirens came closer. “There’s a pulse—”

  The fire in her eyes warned him off. “No thanks to you,” she snapped. “We were doing just fine until you came along.” Her heart hadn’t been broken and Papa Joe hadn’t been beaten to a pulp. She’d never forgive him for that. Never.

  “He’ll pay for this, Maren,” Jared told her, his voice low, steely, as he made the promise. “I swear Shepherd will pay for this.”

  Maren didn’t even acknowledge that she’d heard him. She held J
oe’s hand in both of hers and rocked back and forth.

  Paramedics appeared in the doorway, a gurney between them. Jared waved the men in. The duo appeared bewildered by the beating that apparently had taken place.

  The younger of the two paramedics squatted down. “Jeez, what the hell happened to this guy?”

  Coming around, Maren looked accusingly at Jared. “Someone obviously found out he was talking to the police and tried to kill him.” She felt tears stinging her eyes, tears of anger, of fear and helplessness. She blinked them back. There’d be time for tears later. Right now she needed to stay strong for Joe.

  Doing what they could for Joe, the two paramedics gently placed the unconscious man on the gurney. Aurora General was the closest hospital; they were taking Joe there.

  Jared was torn. He wanted to go with Maren. To be there for her even though she hated his guts right now. And to be there for Joe because, no matter what anyone said to the contrary, he felt it was ultimately his fault that the man had been beaten like this. He should have placed him in protective custody immediately instead of trying to play things out a little longer.

  But his duty was clearly outlined. He caught Maren’s arm as she began to leave. The look in her eyes almost made him back away. It intensified his guilt.

  “Look, I’ve got to stay here and wait for the forensic team. Call me the minute you know something,” he instructed her.

  Jerking her arm away from his grasp, she squared her shoulders. “A hell of a lot you care.” She practically spat the words at him.

  “Yes,” he retorted, his own temper snapping under the weight of what he was enduring, both internally and externally. “I do care. I was the one who wanted him to have police protection.”

  “You were the one who got him into this in the first place.”

  Maren’s words hung in the air as she walked out behind the paramedics.

  She’d held Joe’s limp hand in hers all the way to the hospital, talking to him. Assuring him that he was going to be fine. She forced every single word out past the huge lump in her throat.