Now she didn’t know what she wanted. Chad needed to face the music in Missouri, but she could have found a way to get him there with a lot less subterfuge and fanfare. She just prayed she wasn’t locked inside this plane with him when he did finally put two and two together. He would kill her. Of that she had no doubt. That knowledge sucked the remaining pity for him straight out of her tortured soul.
“Chels, sit down, baby. We’re fixing to land.” He smiled and patted the seat next to him.
She crossed the short distance on wooden legs, sat, and fastened the seatbelt across her lap.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his expression concerned.
“I’m fine.” She was anything but. However, the cogs of these wheels she’d set in motion were beyond her power to halt now.
“Did you hurl?”
“No, but I still feel like I could.” It was a very true statement stemming from worry, guilt, and of course the concussion she most likely had thanks to Chad plowing that gun into her head last night. God, she hated him, which made her guilt for what was about to happen to him all the more confusing.
Minutes after the plane came to a halt, the door separating the cabin and the cockpit opened, and the pilot walked through wearing a pleasant smile. “I’ll have the door opened for you in just a few minutes, Ms. Peebles. There should be a Davenport limo awaiting you on the tarmac.”
Chad chuckled. “You really have it easy, Chels. I’ve never given much thought to your stepfather being Nathan Davenport, but I can see now you really are part of the high life. I’m going to enjoy that.”
Not in this lifetime. “Don’t get too cozy with that notion, Chad. I make my own way in life and take very little from Mom and Nathan.”
He shrugged. “Not claiming you do or that we would. Just saying it will be nice to have him as an in-law. Hey, there’s the limo,” Chad announced, peering out a window.
She turned in her seat and looked out her own. She saw the limo, too, but no police vehicles. Were they running late? Oh no! What if they didn’t show? What would she do? She might actually have to call her dad and go through with this ruse. She prayed it wouldn’t come to that. If her dad saw her face, there was no telling what he might do to Chad. No telling what Chad might do to her dad if he got nasty with him.
God! She just wanted this nightmare to be over!
Minutes later they departed the plane and stepped onto the tarmac. Chad took hold of her hand. “I’m a little nervous about this talk with your dad. What do you think he’ll say when I ask him for your hand?”
“I can’t imagine, Chad. Right now, I’m very nervous too.” She forced a smile for him and felt her cheeks shake from the effort it cost her. She’d never called her dad, because it was never supposed to get that far. The phone call she’d made in front of Chad at her apartment had been fake and had been sent to her own voicemail at work.
He tugged at her hand in an obvious hurry to get to that limo.
“Man, I’m anxious about this.” Chad flashed her an apprehensive look.
She offered him one in return. “So am I.” Where in the heck were the police?
Her gaze honed on their destination again—the limo. Seconds later, the back door on the passenger side opened and a blond man crawled out wearing dark-tinted glasses and a very fierce scowl.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, skidding to a halt in her tracks.
It was Asa!
Chapter 13
Thinking her eyes deceived her, Chelsie blinked and adjusted her glasses. There was no way Asa could be here! Even if he’d found out she’d taken this trip to Springfield with Chad, how could he have managed a flight arriving here before her own?
But there he stood beside the limo, and he did not look happy.
Moments later, the back door on the opposite side opened and Tiffany stepped out, followed by Christian, then her mother.
“What the heck’s going on?” Chad growled.
That had been the very question she’d been about to utter. Her shocked gaze slashed to his very angry one. “I honestly don’t know. There is no logical way they could be here right now. I didn’t tell any of them about this trip. Obviously, they found out somehow… Oh no,” she groaned. She’d left that legal pad in her desk, which contained her “Chad list,” and apparently her sister had gone snooping.
“What do you mean by oh no? Oh no what?”
“Tiffany!” She spat her sister’s name like a curse. “Meddling woman!” She still had no idea how they’d arrived before her, but seeing her mom, she suspected Nathan to be involved somehow. That man could make just about anything impossible, possible.
The four serious-faced people headed their direction.
Chad yanked on her arm, pulling her about to face him. “What about Tiffany? Are she and that damned vampire lover of yours trying to stop us from seeing your dad?”
“It certainly looks that way.”
“Did you tell them about this trip? About me talking to your dad?”
She jerked her arm free and stepped back. “No! I didn’t say a word to anyone about this!”
Movement behind Asa and her family members caught Chelsie’s attention. Two Greene County Sheriff’s SUVs drove out of a hanger not far from the limo, gained speed, and headed straight for them.
This was it. With the advent of her family—coupled with the police—it was over. Her hand had been played, and Chad was going down. That should have delighted her, but she felt more shame than satisfaction, especially with her family witness to her duplicitous charade.
“What the hell, Chels? What’s going on?” Chad glared at her, his expression more fearful than angry, demanding answers.
Chelsie said nothing. The police would reveal the answer to his question in moments.
Everyone converged on them at the same time. The police vehicles stopped mere feet from them, and four officers jumped out, rushed toward them guns drawn, and told the others to stand back. Chelsie’s heart nearly stopped.
Too many guns in the last twenty-four hours.
“Chad Raker?” one of the officers asked.
“Who wants to know? And why?” He snarled.
His eyes blazed with anger and defiance, but Chelsie knew him too well. He was quaking in his cowboy boots.
The same cop said, “We have a warrant for your arrest for rape and assault and battery in the first degree.”
All of them got straight to business from there, reading him his rights and cuffing him. Blessedly, he didn’t fight, but he looked like he wanted to. She couldn’t blame him. There would be nothing good in store for him for a very long time.
Chelsie glanced at her family and Asa, all of whom were watching the scene unfold with stoic silence. Not a one of them looked the least bit surprised by Chad being taken into custody. No wonder. That list Tiffany had snooped out would have been like a trail of breadcrumbs the three blind mice could have followed to this conclusion.
“Chelsie. This is bull crap. You know I’d never do anything like that. This girl who I suspect filed the charges was pissed at me for breaking things off right before I moved to New Orleans. You gotta believe me, baby.”
Well, there was another lie. Nathan told her the event had happened eight months ago, and Chad had only been in NOLA a little over three.
Chelsie just shook her head, because after last night, she had no doubt the charge was true. How events had occurred between him and the girl who had filed it didn’t matter, but knowing Chad, he’d probably been drunk and turned violent when she resisted his nasty intentions or gave him attitude. She had no desire to know exactly what had happened.
“Come on,” one of the officers said as he led him none too gently by the arm toward the cruiser. The three remaining officers had him surrounded, and one took hold of his other arm.
Chad shot a parting look of wrath at Asa then shared it amongst Tiffany, Christian, and her mother. “I don’t know which one of you fucking vampires is responsible for this, but I’ll find
out. When I do, you have my word there will come a day of reckoning.”
Chelsie couldn’t let that go. No way would she allow him to take this out on them if he somehow got of jail. “It was me, Chad. They had absolutely nothing to do with this. I called the law on you and arranged for them to meet us here so I could put an end to your insanity and threats.”
That sent him through the roof. He wrestled free of the officers’ hold and spun on her. Fury and retribution boiled in his gaze. “You set me up? You fucking whore!”
He didn’t get any further. The four cops had him face down on the asphalt so fast, his forehead hit with a resounding crack. All four officers commanded him to settle down. One now had his gun pointed at him, and another was telling him they were adding a resisting arrest charge.
Chad’s face was turned her way, and his expression could only be described as murderous. “You just wait, Chels. You think last night was bad? Wait and see what I have in store for you next time we cross paths.”
Chelsie clamped a hand over her mouth and pivoted, unable to witness another second of this gut-wrenching scene. This was exactly what she’d expected to happen when he learned the truth. If there had been any honesty in his words on that plane, any chance for him to change and get right with God, it was gone now. She should have never taken it upon herself to get Chad arrested. She could have just as easily let the Greene County Sheriff’s department know where he was and have them deal with extraditing him.
From there, it just got vile. He called her every vicious, nasty name under the sun and was still going when the police got him into the back of an SUV and shut the door. After the engines started up, she ventured a glance toward the others. Her mother headed to her, then folded her into a hug, but Chelsie was too numb to return one.
Her mom pulled back and stared at her, a frown creasing her brow. “It’s going to be okay, honey. Let’s get you home.” Her mother took her arm and led her back to the jet.
A few minutes later, they were all seated inside, she in-between her mother and Asa. Tiffany and Christian each settled into one of the jet’s tan, leather captain-style seats across from them. Chelsie shared a glance between them. All stared back at her with anxious expressions.
“Are you okay?” Asa asked then took her hand.
“Not really.”
Her mother spoke next. “What happened, honey? We all know why you brought Chad here. What we need to know is why you did it.”
She swallowed a couple times. Hard. Recounting the horrors of this past day and night were the last thing she wanted to do. She was mentally and physically baked and wanted to go home, take some Melatonin, and sleep for a good twelve hours, but that wasn’t going to happen. The band played at Cajun Refugees tonight. Colt would be filling in for Chad. She’d called him and the rest of the guys before she’d left her office and told them Chad had been arrested for a traffic violation gone bad after getting in the face of the officer who had pulled him over—another lie, but an easy one for them to believe because it had happened before.
“Chelsie?” her mother prompted.
“Last night when I arrived home, I found Chad in my apartment with a gun.”
“Oh, dear Lord,” her mother exclaimed and clamped a hand over her mouth.
“What did he do to you?” Asa growled, his green eyes glimmering with retribution.
Tiffany and Christian didn’t say anything, but they looked just as outraged as Asa.
She turned her focus back to Asa. “You have a pretty good idea what happened, and the details don’t matter at this point. He forced me to sign that contract, which as you know I’d been stalling on. And umm…he forced me to break up with you, so to speak.”
Asa’s brows furrowed. “You’re leaving too many gaping holes in this story, Chelsie. Fill them in.”
That was the last thing she wanted to do, but he was here now because he loved her and no doubt worried sick like the rest of them. She sighed. “He broke in at some point before I arrived home after having dinner with you. I don’t have any idea how long he’d been there, but he’d been snooping. He found that A&P textbook you and Christian wrote in forty-eight, which you had me all but memorize during my internship. Apparently, it convinced him. He figured out you and Christian were vampire. He asked me about Tiffany.” She gave her sister an apologetic look as she reached up and rubbed the knot on the back of her head.
Tiffany muttered a curse that made their mother’s face crease with a scolding frown. “Don’t feel bad for telling him, Chels, about me or any of us. I’m sure that bruise on your face and any other ones you have are a result of you trying to keep the truth from him.”
She nodded. “He mentioned something about having a score to settle with you, which he didn’t expound on. He threatened to kill all of you if I didn’t basically make the band and his priorities mine. After he left, I spent the night coming up with this plan to get him to Missouri so I could have him arrested on that rape warrant Mom and Nathan told me about last Sunday.”
Her mother clucked her tongue. “Honey, why didn’t you call me? You know Nathan could have settled the matter quickly and without you endangering yourself by all of this today.”
She bit her lip and rubbed the painful knot on her head again. “I know, but I had to do this. If I’d told you and Nathan or Asa that he’d beat me, he would have ended up in far worse shape than I am now. I just wanted him to face the music here in Missouri, not get beaten to a pulp or killed.”
Asa grabbed her hand away from her head, then began to palpate the area she’d been touching. “He would have deserved a sound beating from me or Nathan. I’m pretty irritated at you right now, Chelsie. What you did, bringing him here on a lie, could have gotten you killed.”
“Ouch.” She jerked away from him. He’d found the bruise, and the curse he muttered was punctuation.
“Damn it, Chelsie. That thing is huge. You probably have a concussion.” He clenched his teeth, and his jaw ticked.
She knew he was furious, worried too. Minimizing the truth would have been useless. “No probably about it. I definitely have one. Like I told you this morning, I did all I could.”
“Bull,” he spat. “You could have spent the day resting, keeping ice on those damned bruises instead of hatching this hair-brained scheme that could have cost you more bruises, or worse—your life.”
Christian spoke. “Give her a break, Asa. She was traumatized and has a head injury. You can’t expect her to have stellar thinking.”
Asa grunted then glared at her. “He’s right. You certainly haven’t been thinking straight. Your mom’s right too. What did you think to gain by doing this?”
Chelsie was tired of everyone treating her like an addle-brained porcelain doll, and she was getting pissed. “All of you need to back off. None of you were there, and none of you can understand. I did what I did to protect all of you. He threatened to kill Tiffany and Asa, any one of you! I’ll admit I did it for revenge too. Maybe my thinking was a bit self-serving, but I thought if I could convince Chad I was pregnant—”
“Whoa, what? Pregnant?” Tiffany exclaimed.
“Pregnant?” Asa said almost in unison with Tiffany.
Chelsie held up her hands, a gesture to silence them. “Let me finish. I told him I was pregnant, that we had slept together one night when he was drunk, which of course never happened, but he believed it. I thought if I could convince him there was a child, I could wrestle him into a position where I could gain the upper hand. Worst case scenario, I thought it would make him believe Asa and I were over and he’d back off with the threats. Best case would be he’d want to be a father to this pretend baby, and that’s exactly what happened. He actually wanted to marry me and raise the child. He thought we were coming to Springfield to meet with my father in order for Chad to ask him if he could marry me. But, of course, I had the police here waiting for him with that rape warrant.”
That bombshell of a speech took the steam out of her audience. Chelsie
glanced between them. Each looked their own shade of amazed and confused.
“How in the heck did you accomplish that?” Tiffany asked.
“The first night we played in New Orleans, we had a getting-the-band-back-together celebration at the guys’ hotel. They all drank too much, especially Chad.” She shrugged. “I’m sure it wasn’t a hard stretch of the imagination for him to have believed something happened between us. You know how Chad is—how wasted he gets when he parties. He probably has been in that situation before.”
Tiffany grinned and crossed her arms. “Actually, Chels, that’s pretty diabolical thinking. I like it.”
“Well, I don’t.” Asa snarled.
Chelsie was by no means proud of herself, but she had gotten the job done. “Part of my reasons for doing this were selfish, I’ll admit. I imagined standing aside while he was arrested, applauding while I told him how brilliantly I’d played him. Reality wasn’t as sweet as fantasy, I’m afraid.”
She felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder. “Chelsie, honey, you have a very tender, compassionate heart. Of course you feel guilty. Revenge is not an act meant to be executed by a Christian. Or by anyone for that matter. I wish I could make these feelings go away for you, but I can’t. However, Chad is where he belongs presently. For that you should be grateful.”
She lifted her head and glared at her mom. “Grateful? That emotion will never be something I feel over this. Lying to Chad about a pretend baby was in the same league as all his lies and manipulations. I can’t believe I lowered myself to his standards. What makes it even worse is the fact that I witnessed a very profound change in him. He really wanted to be a father, and I think he really wanted to set his life straight. He’s so raging mad at me right now…I just hope what I did doesn’t cost him his soul.”
Tiffany snorted. “What the heck is wrong with you? Chad’s soul has been lost for so many years, God Himself probably has no clue where it is. I don’t know what he said to you, but he got to you if he made you feel sorry for him. And I’ve seen it happen so many times in the past, it makes me want to puke. I really thought that, thanks to Asa, you’d finally gotten Chad out of your system, but apparently not if you can actually believe whatever song and dance he performed for you on that flight.”
Deadly Secrets (Forever and a Night Book 3) Page 16
