The Bastard

by Julie Kriss

  “If he wasted a flight, that’s too bad,” Max said. “If he hadn’t gone so far off the grid, at least he’d know what was going on. It’s impossible to keep tabs on this guy in the middle of the jungle.”

  It was true. I had one Hotmail address for Dylan, and that was all. When I’d used it to inform him his father had died and he needed to come to the States to discuss the will, I had gotten a one-line response: Not going to happen. Give up and fuck off.

  Then Dylan had deleted the email account entirely and vanished into Panama.

  The King family, you could say, was a little dysfunctional.

  I actually sort of liked Dylan’s half sisters. Veronica, known as Ronnie, was smart and responsible. She was about to marry Clayton Rorick after an epic romance that spanned years of angst and unrequited love. That kind of romance wasn’t for me, but I was glad she was happy. Sabrina, the youngest, looked like an LA type, but underneath she was sweet and actually rather charming. She, too, was in love, with the sheriff who had saved her from her stalker. They were an unlikely couple, but he seemed pretty smitten. It was too early for me to talk to her about a prenup—I’m a lawyer, it’s my nature—but at least I knew she was in good hands.

  Bea, the middle sister, was tougher. Her debts had gotten her into trouble, which meant she needed money from her father’s estate. But I had a feeling that Bea could turn things around—that is, if she actually wanted to.

  So the sisters were at least trying, sort of, to have a real relationship. It would be easier now that their father was dead. I worked for Hank for years, and I owed him a great deal, but even I could easily see that he was an epic asshole who’d treated his daughters like less than nothing. It had always been Dylan, the one and only son, who had interested Hank.

  To be honest, Dylan interested me, too.

  Alongside his legal affairs, Hank King had hired the firm to keep detailed tabs on his son and report regularly. Hank hated that Dylan wasn’t under his thumb. In all his years of marrying and cheating, Hank had never had another son—only Dylan. Even in his absence, Dylan had been Hank’s favorite child, the one whose bitch of a mother had kept him away, the one Hank always hoped would come back and take over the family business. He’d neglected his daughters without a shred of guilt, but he’d torn himself to pieces over Dylan. So I’d hired Max and a few other investigators over the years, and I’d kept a file. And I’d been paid for it.

  I might not have Dylan’s email address anymore, but I knew everything else it was possible to know. Even though I’d never met the man in person.

  Then Hank had suddenly died, and I was still keeping tabs on Dylan. Because I was Hank’s lawyer and the estate was my business.

  Which meant Dylan King was my business.

  I even knew who Dylan had slept with over the years. That part wasn’t really my business. That was more of a hobby, let’s say.

  “Okay, so we don’t tell him,” I said to Max. “Let him come home and I’ll catch him in Texas and break the news to him. I’ll get on a flight back to Dallas.” God, even the thought was exhausting. But if the prodigal son was coming home, then I would have to meet him. I had no other way of talking to him except tackling him face-to-face. If he had a phone number, I’d certainly had never had it.

  Max was saying something about Dallas. “Sorry, I missed that. What?”

  “I was saying you don’t need to go to Dallas,” Max said. “Dylan King is coming to you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he flies to LA first and changes airlines. He has a layover. He’ll be at LAX in six hours.”

  I looked out the window at the golden sunshine, the glint of lights off the cars of LA traffic outside the Starbucks window. Hank King’s main holdings were in Texas, but my firm was based in LA, where Hank had a penthouse. Dylan, the man I knew only through a file—and phone call reports like this one—was going to be here. Here. In six hours.

  My heart sped up and my knees went a little weak. For a second, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d hit the top of my profession by age thirty, I’d made damned close to seven figures last year, and I’d worked for the most difficult man in Texas. I’d served people papers that made them cry, sat in conference rooms and watched people’s lives fall apart without feeling a thing. My staff called me the Ice Princess behind my back. And now my knees were weak at the thought of one man I’d never met landing at LAX.

  I was never weak. Never.

  “Miss,” the girl behind the Starbucks counter said. “Can I take your order?”

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “Your order,” the girl said. The woman in front of me had already ordered and stepped aside, and she gave me a curious look. The man in line behind me did, too.

  “I don’t…” I couldn’t think. My brain was a blank except for the words Dylan King is going to be here in six hours. After all this time.

  “Maddy?” Max said through the phone.

  Dylan King is going to be here in six hours.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said to Max. I ended the call and walked away from the counter, heading for the door. I pushed out onto the Beverly Hills street and put my sunglasses on, staring at nothing as people brushed past me.

  Dylan King. I could see his face clearly in my mind, because my file had a collection of photographs. Dylan in high school, Dylan in basic training. Dylan on the beach in Panama, walking shirtless through the sand, a pensive look on his face. Dylan in front of a bank in Panama City after withdrawing some of his military pay.

  He’d grown out his hair since leaving the forces, and its dark strands were longer now on his forehead and behind his ears. He’d also grown a beard, which was dark and trim against his perfect jaw. His time in Central America had made him look a little disreputable but he still had that trained intensity, a bad boy with well-honed steely strength and grace. He looked like a man who would break your neck as soon as that pesky hangover cleared up.

  And, yeah, it was my job as his father’s lawyer to investigate him. But I’d spent a lot of time off the clock looking at that file. At those photographs.

  Some of the photos had women in them. Even while deployed, Dylan King had found women around the globe. There was an ambassador’s daughter in Beirut who had been only twenty-two and looked like a lingerie model. There was a curvaceous government aide in Chechnya who had sent him a string of filthily erotic emails we’d intercepted. He’d only been in Morocco for nineteen days for an assignment, but we still got a picture of him with a sensationally beautiful woman in one of Marrakesh’s most expensive hotels, sipping a cup of mint tea as she played footsie with him under the table. I had spent way too much time in my off hours looking at those pictures, rereading those dirty emails—good God, what those two had gotten up to—and wondering if there was a country on the planet Dylan King hadn’t yet conquered in the sack.

  He’s going to be here in six hours, Maddy. What are you going to do?

  I took a breath. I was a professional, and I had a job to do. Hank had always wanted his son, his one and only son, to come back to the States and stay. He’d never been able to achieve it; Dylan had always shut his father down, when he bothered to answer his emails at all. Now Hank was dead, but Sabrina getting kidnapped had achieved what Hank had never been able to do. In six hours I had my one and only shot at getting Dylan King back in the fold.

  And if the thought of coming face-to-face with Dylan made my blood pound, which never happened, I could deal with that.

  I pulled out my keys and headed for the parking lot and my car. Dylan King was in for the surprise of a lifetime, and he wasn’t going back to the jungle. When he heard what I had to tell him, he’d be home for good.

  3

  DYLAN

  Eight hours driving through the jungle—a mudslide on the road made things interesting—and another three waiting at the airport for the next available flight to go out. Six hours in the air, and I still wasn’t back in Texas. I was
in LA, of all places, where already people were looking at me like I didn’t belong. Maybe it was the tat on my arm or the untrimmed beard. Maybe it was the old jeans and T-shirt I was wearing—literally the clothes I’d had on my back when I’d seen the news story in the Yaviza Bar. Maybe it was the fact that I smelled, which I definitely did. Maybe it was just my scowl as I thought about Sabrina. Whatever the reason, people gave me a wide, wary berth as I shouldered my single leather bag and walked through the crowds in LAX.

  I pulled out my cell phone and turned it on. I had a four-hour layover before I got on a plane to Dallas, and I needed to find out what was happening with Sabrina. I needed to reach whoever was in charge and offer them my services—if Sabrina was still alive. Welcome back to America, I told myself as I configured the signal. Do you know what year it is? I had a feeling I was going to need more than a dollar to buy a beer.

  Four hours. I could use four hours. I had no email—fuck email—but at least I had a phone, though no one but my old commanding officer had the number. I could start assessing the situation by phone, coordinate a plan. I was exhausted, but I’d gone longer than this without sleep before. All I needed was somewhere quiet.

  I was still looking down at the phone when a pair of women’s legs approached me. A long, elegant pair of women’s legs, feet in open-toed heels. They stopped in front of me and a voice said, “Dylan King.”

  It wasn’t a question. I racked my brain quickly, trying to remember if I had any exes who had moved to LA. I couldn’t think of any. I fixed my gaze to the legs and let it slide upward.

  She was almost as tall as me. A killer body, those long legs attached to a firm pair of hips, a narrow waist, a nice set of breasts. All of it clothed in a short dress made of some kind of expensive cream-colored linen that fit her like a glove. Her honey-brown hair was long and tied back in a low ponytail; a set of bangs swept over her forehead. A pair of sunglasses was pushed up on her head. She had brown eyes rimmed with dark lashes, a straight nose, and lips that were pink and glossy. She looked like a wet dream, perfect and unattainable.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said.

  The woman looked me up and down, her expression giving nothing away. “Madison White,” she said. “I’m your father’s lawyer.”

  This was my father’s lawyer? I searched my brain for the name and remembered the emails I’d received after Hank died. The last email was to tell me something about Hank’s will, and I’d replied something along the lines of fuck off right before I hit Delete on the entire account. Then I’d had a letter from her firm, sent to my former unit. It was an offer from Clayton Rorick, saying he was going to marry my half sister Ronnie and offering me two and a half million dollars to stay away from King Industries.

  I’d mailed the letter straight back to Ronnie and told her not to marry that dirtbag. But since Sabrina had been kidnapped at Ronnie’s engagement party, I was guessing the message didn’t take.

  I’d pictured a gray-haired battle-ax on the other side of those emails and letters, not this wickedly sexy female. Though I shouldn’t have been surprised. Hank always had a weakness for beautiful women.

  There was a more important problem, though. “How the fuck did you know I was here?” I asked her.

  Her lips pressed together in a firm line. “I have my sources of information, Mr. King. You and I need to talk.”

  “Sure we do,” I said. “We need to talk about how you knew what flight I was on, considering I only bought the ticket hours ago. For cash.”

  The corner of her mouth turned up. She might look like a fantasy—albeit a buttoned-up one—but that smirk and the look in those dark eyes said she was a woman who was used to winning. “Mr. King,” she said, “I worked for your father for four years before he died. Do you honestly think he didn’t know where you were and what you were doing?”

  “I don’t give a shit what my father knew,” I said, though silently I wondered who had leaked information, because last I checked I didn’t have a GPS up my ass. “And if you’re so well-informed, then you know my sister Sabrina has been kidnapped. So I’m on my way to Dallas.” I brushed past her—she smelled good, clean with a whiff of some kind of perfumey shampoo, giving my body a brief twinge of regret that we weren’t both naked—and continued through the crowd in the terminal, heading to check in for my next flight.

  “Wait,” I heard her call after me. I didn’t stop, just kept walking, shoving my phone in my pocket. Miss Legal Wet Dream would have had to buy a ticket to get this far into the airport. She’d wasted her money. She could get back in her no doubt expensive car and leave me the hell alone.

  But she didn’t. I heard her heels clicking behind me, jogging surprisingly fast. “Wait,” she said again, and her hand reached out and grabbed my arm.

  I turned. She’d grabbed my biceps, and her touch burned into my skin beneath the sleeve of my T-shirt. She looked a little frazzled, as if she hadn’t quite expected me to walk away. As if she hadn’t wanted me to.

  Then she got control again, and her chin went up, her eyes going hard. “You don’t understand, Mr. King,” she said. “We really do need to talk.”

  “We don’t,” I said. “And Mr. King was my father. My name is Dylan.”

  She blinked those dark lashes, and for a split second there was uncertainty in her eyes. I realized she hadn’t dropped her hand, and it was still on my biceps. I glanced down at it. Her fingers were long and elegant, her skin pale against my tan. She wore a gold ring studded with small, understated stones on her middle finger, feminine and expensive, and she had a narrow gold designer watch on her wrist. Looking at her white skin, her expensive jewelry against my tats and worn T-shirt, made my blood thump hard in my veins for a heady second, sending a shot straight down below my belt.

  I don’t have a type. I like women—beautiful women, available women, women with no strings attached. I like women who flirt and lick their lips when they look at me, women who like to fuck. I like women who know the drill: we fuck, it’s spectacular, we both get off, repeat as many times as needed. Then we move on. It’s animal instinct, pure and simple.

  So high-class women weren’t specifically my type. But the sight of Madison White’s hand on my skin made my head spin, and for a second I forgot where I was. Every part of me woke up.

  I looked back up at her face and saw that her lips had parted, as if she was as surprised as I was. Then she dropped her hand and stepped back, as if trying to lessen the effect. “Your half sister is fine,” she said in a rush. “They found her last night, shortly after she was kidnapped. They caught the guy. She’s unharmed. It’s over.”

  I stared at her hard, wondering if she had a reason to lie. “Sabrina wasn’t hurt?” I asked.

  Madison White shook her head. “No. I swear it. You can look it up yourself—it’s all over the news. She’s fine.”

  I blew out a breath, ran a hand over my face, rasped it over my beard. “Fuck,” I said. Relief hit me like a blow, followed quickly by tiredness so heavy it threatened to make my shoulders droop. “They took him down? The man who abducted her?”

  “Yes.”

  Without me. So much for Dylan King, superhero. “What did he want? Why did he take her?”

  Madison blinked. “He’s nuts, apparently. He went to high school with Sabrina and has been obsessed with her ever since. He thinks he’s in love with her. Sometimes women in the public eye, like Sabrina, attract creeps.”

  “She isn’t just any woman. She’s my sister.”

  That smirk again. “Half sister. One you haven’t seen in years.”

  “Yeah? And how do you know that?”

  “Well, I could be a genius. Or maybe I know it because Sabrina told me. I just got back from The King’s Land last night.”

  That gave me a punch in the gut, which surprised me. The thought of Madison at my family home, talking to my sister, learning things about her that I didn’t know, made me strangely jealous. Which I shouldn’t be, because this woman was one hundred
per cent right. I hadn’t seen Sabrina in years. Ronnie or Bea, either. I’d been a crack Special Ops agent and an excellent fighter, but I was a terrible brother. A terrible son. It was pure survival instinct, the drive to get the fuck away from anything King. I didn’t like to think about my reasons.

  Except now, after all these years, I was fucking thinking about it.

  “Okay,” I said to Madison. “I still have no idea how you found me, but thank you for the update. It’s good news. I’m still going to see Sabrina. I’m off to take a nap, then get on a plane to Dallas.”

  “Wait,” she called as I turned to go.

  I looked back at her, still walking. “What?”

  “You’re not going to Dallas.”

  “Sorry, but I am.”

  Madison crossed her arms. “You’re not, actually. But please, don’t take my word for it. Just go to the counter and try to check in.”

  I shook my head, turned away, and kept walking.

  And twenty minutes later I was fucking steamed.

  I’d had a ticket to Dallas when I left Panama. Bought and paid for. I had to switch airlines, though which meant at the low-tech ticket counter in Panama it had been two separate tickets. The problem was, when I got to the second airline’s counter, I found my ticket had been canceled.

  Completely canceled, no exchanges and no refunds. And even if the flight hadn’t been full—which it was—I didn’t have enough money to buy a new ticket on the spot. I could try to get on the next flight to Dallas, but it didn’t leave until morning.

  I thanked the woman behind the counter before I left, because it wasn’t her I was mad at. I had a pretty good idea who was to blame.

  Sure enough, she was still standing where I’d left her, though she had moved to the side to let the crowds walk by. She was talking on her cell phone, her weight leaning on one hip, her head tilted. How the hell old was she? Thirty maybe, yet she was my father’s lawyer, dealing with his multimillion-dollar estate. In the seconds before she noticed my approach I heard her say into the phone, “No, Gerald. Tomorrow isn’t good enough. I need that paperwork filed today. Go to the courthouse if you have to. Yes, I know it’s getting late and the traffic is bad. Figure it out.”