He didn’t have to rush and escape. Her rides were incredibly long.
He just watched her with loathing and hate.
This was only beginning.
The last two made him pause, but he couldn’t give up. This was about retribution and paying the family back.
They deserved it.
The man-child was next.
He, too, had been marked to pay for his family’s sins. There was no escaping it until they were all dead.
This pathetic excuse for a human was spoiled, disgusting, and had so many secrets that if they got out, the family would be doomed. Yes, he could have just spilled it, since he saw it go down, but why bother?
Why ruin it?
It would come out in time—he was sure.
This was about maximum punishment for those who deserved it.
So, on that cold, wet night, when he’d had too much to drink, he did the deed. He waited for the man and ran him off the road. When he checked to see if he was dead, the fire had already started and it was destined to consume the man trapped behind the wheel.
Instead of helping the still breathing man escape, he wrapped the seatbelt around his neck and made sure if he woke up, he wouldn’t be getting out.
That’s when his eyes opened.
“Please help me.”
He laughed and then punched him hard in the face. As soon as his head whipped back, his eyes closed, and he was out cold.
Perfect.
It was time to watch the foul genetic brew of disgustingness cook alive in his own stupidity.
The fire spread, and the man in the car was soon engulfed in flames. There was no way out and that was the perfect end to a self-absorbed Easton life.
You reap what you sow.
This family deserved this.
All of them had deserved to go in the most painful way possible. Not only for his justice, but for the ones they’d hurt along the way.
There had been many.
There had been so many secrets left hidden in that horrible estate that if it should ever get out, the Easton name would be nothing more than a bad word.
It deserved that notoriety.
Heading back to his truck, he got the hell out of there and made sure he had an alibi.
He wouldn’t go down for this crime either.
No freaking way.
He planned it well, and in the end, no one would be blamed for this crime but the family of self-indulged assholes. They were the Eastons, and this was how they lived life.
Dangerously.
Now, as two more years had passed, and time had been on his side, it was time to take out the last woman standing.
It was time for her to pay too.
He felt bad about it, too, but as of late, she’d made it a game. He’d tried a few times to get to her, but he couldn’t quite make it happen.
She’d slip through his fingers.
She’d escape at the last second.
She’d proved that luck was on her side.
Too bad.
Hate and revenge were on his.
Well, he wasn’t done.
She was an Easton, so she had to die—no matter how much he liked her. She wasn’t horrible like the rest, but her DNA carried the truth. She was sick, vile, and just like them. There was no way around it.
With each passing day, she managed to elude him, and it was pissing him off.
Like now.
As he sat in the shadows, tracking her, she was getting into her Jeep and heading away from the estate.
Where the hell was she going?
When would she be back?
He never knew with her. She was a recluse, and hid out most of the time. It had made his life…inconvenient.
Well, when she got back, she was in for one hell of a surprise. He was going to grab her, and she was going to go missing.
She was never going to be seen again, and then…
Justice would be served, and he was going to be able to enjoy life at last.
He’d earned it.
The Easton family was full of forbidden secrets, and he was going to fix that. Before it was all said and done, the slate would be wiped clean.
For him.
For the ones they hurt.
For the ones left behind.
This time, they were hunted.
This time, they were going to be the ones who bled.
Before this was done, there wouldn’t be a single solitary one left to enjoy the money or prestige.
He’d make sure of that.
From the old lady, to the spoiled boy who liked fast cars and stupid women, they’d paid, and so would she.
Miss Easton was going to rue the day she was brought into this hellish family.
She’d rue the day she’d become one of them.
In the end, he would make sure she knew what had happened, who had destroyed her, and why she had to pay for their sins.
Kind or not, there was no statute of limitations on the sins committed by her family.
They’d done the crime, and now they’d do the time.
In hell.
He was coming for her.
Then…
It was done.
Chapter One
Monday
Littlemoon Investigations
It was another workweek, and it was beginning to look like it was going to be an uphill battle for the entire office and staff. As usual, nothing was going as planned.
Shocking.
It was early in the day, and already the phones hadn’t stopped ringing, the team was rushing about, and they still hadn’t had time for their morning meeting.
It was days like this that proved to be a shit-mess right off the bat.
Julian hated them.
He liked his days to go by schedule, and today was doing the exact opposite. He felt out of control. He hoped it wasn’t going to be an omen of what was happening for the rest of the week.
Great.
He didn’t need that.
Glancing down at his watch, he knew that his team needed to get into the conference room and sit down, or they were going to have a rough time coordinating the entire week’s cases.
Meetings weren’t there to screw with the team, but to prepare them for what was coming.
Julian needed to be prepared. Unlike his wife, he didn’t like to fly by the seat of his pants.
No, that sucked for him.
He was all about control of the situation.
There was only one solution.
He was going to have to find his team, drag them to the meeting, and get it done—whether they liked it or not.
Going from room to room and office to office, he began locating the people he relied on to keep his business afloat.
They were family.
They mattered.
He was building ‘Littlemoon Inc.’ from the ground up and on a foundation of family. That was the strongest way to shore up his business.
With family, they would work hard for the company, ensuring that they were a success. When you had more skin in the game, you made sure you gave it your all.
And his family was doing just that.
It grew from him and Tori to adding in a twin, a wife, a few siblings, and now all the spouses. It was expanding in leaps and bounds.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
Their notoriety got them a lot of attention. There were clients coming out of the woodwork. They had special skills, and word was traveling.
Julian was glad.
All he’d ever wanted in life was to be the boss of a flourishing company, and he’d gotten his wish.
Maybe he should have been careful for what he wished for, since along with success came the downfall of his worst nightmare.
They were media magnets.
Everywhere they went, every case they handled, there were photographers watching them. Add to it that Beau and Tori’s mother was fueling the fire, and it didn’t make it easier.
Hell!
It gave them infamy and that they didn’t need.
No one there wanted to be in the spotlight. It was damn hard to be a private investigator when you couldn’t sneak around and take pictures.
How could you be stealthy when you had cameras following you?
You couldn’t.
It made making money far more challenging.
The last divorce case they took, the paparazzi blew it wide open when they surrounded Tori in her ride.
The flashing cameras, the shouts of questions…it warned the cheating spouse and they’d ended up refunding the client’s money.
They’d had to turn tail and retreat.
The gig was up, and so was their old business plan. It had to change with them.
From that moment on, they’d had to start changing the kinds of cases they were taking. Gone were the bread and butter assignments where it was easy money. Gone were the jobs where they sat in a car, snapping pictures. As his wife put it, this was boots on the ground from here on out.
They couldn’t take divorce cases, or the simple worker’s comp assignments either.
They couldn’t go incognito.
That was gone.
Everyone knew their faces, and with each assignment, outside the office doors, they were the center of attention.
Now they were focused on the more in-depth ones—the ones where people went missing, or where there was some theft.
The change in the environment forced them to adapt. It was the nature of the beast.
This was Darwinism by media proxy.
If they didn’t up their game, alter their business plan, and rearrange their work load, they were screwed.
If ‘Littlemoon Inc.’ wanted to survive, it had to start evolving alongside the media.
So, their new motto was formed.
They didn’t just find the lost.
No…
They found the dead, the spooky, and anything that went bump in the night.
Yes, Julian had given up.
For weeks, he’d battled against the oncoming storm. Tori’s gift had kicked up, and she was changing.
Don’t get him wrong…he loved his wife, and always would, but he had to accept her for her.
All of her.
Spooky included.
Tori was tough, badass, and a force to reckon with—even as she was pregnant and carrying his child. If this was what she felt was right, Julian was going to go with it.
He’d tried fighting.
He’d tried altering the path.
He’d failed.
So, he was getting in line.
Why do battle? After all, Tori was still the same gorgeous redhead he fell in love with and married, but now she was modified.
She talked to the dead.
Often.
At first, it freaked him out. The whole thing rattled his cage.
How could it not?
His wife was now a full-blown medium, and that was a scary thing. At one time, she had to go into a trance to talk to the dead. Now she only had to focus.
She’d do this blank stare thing, and it was spooky. It made his skin crawl, but he had to adjust. The facts were the facts.
She was stronger.
Tori was coming into her own power as a woman, a mother-to-be, and as a medium.
In a way, he was glad that she was gaining a strong gift of knowing what was happening around her.
She had precious cargo onboard.
Veronica, his progeny, was safely housed in her body—swimming in the goo. She was growing too, and soon, he’d be holding his little girl.
It was bittersweet.
She was likely going to be his one shot at fatherhood, and for the longest time, he was worried.
Well, Julian stopped worrying.
A little…
While he would always want to protect his wife, simply because that was his duty, she had her own defense mechanism. With Bethany, her spirit guide, and Trey, her deceased brother, she was packing ghost heat.
At first, it stung a little that she was safer with them than with him, but he’d gotten over it.
He had to.
They did what he couldn’t do.
They warned her before anything bad happened. In fact, they warned everyone around them. If the danger still got past that, well, his wife would just kick someone’s ass.
That was her final line of defense.
Even pregnant, she was still badass.
Julian had to believe in her. If he didn’t, it was going to destroy his marriage. Mistrust had threatened to erode it away, and this was the only option.
So, he’d tolerate the ghosts.
The ass grabs from Bethany.
The witty banter from Trey—the dead soldier.
It was all in a day’s work for him. If you can’t beat them, join them. In a way, he was a tad bit envious. His wife was special. Before she was, too, but now she had some gift that he’d never have in his life.
He was proud of her.
He was proud of himself for getting past this huge obstacle in life.
If Victoria needed spooky cases to exorcise the demons haunting her mind, so be it.
He was onboard.
Peeking his head into their shared office, he found her sitting there studying a file.
“Hey, Tori, are you ready for the morning meeting?” he asked, getting her attention.
“Yeah. I’m just looking over the budget for this month. We’re close to going into the red.”
He was aware.
“We have fees to collect. I’m going to put Justin on it later this week. With Kane out, we don’t have our enforcer to scare the hell out of the non-paying clients.”
It was funny.
When Kane came a knockin’ the checks were a rockin’. Now that he and Christina were taking some paternity time off for the birth of their son, the duties were shuffled.
“I can go out if you need me to.”
He started laughing. “Yeah, you just want to flash a gun and scare people. So…no. That’s never going to happen, my beautiful but crazy wife.”
She pulled her red hair back into a ponytail and stood up. The second she did, Tori saw him glance down at her growing baby bump.
She got it.
Julian, while trying to give her some space to be herself, still had a few things he simply couldn’t accept.
Tori in danger was one of them.
He focused on her face. “Sorry, but…”
“You don’t have to apologize, Jules. I get it. I’ll stick close. Do you have a cookie?”
He snorted and shook his head at the abrupt change in conversation. A pregnant woman was like a person with ADHD. “No, I don’t have any cookies. It’s barely nine in the morning. Have an apple.”
She stared at them on the desk. “You’re no fun. I’m telling your mother.”
Julian crossed his arms. “You wouldn’t dare rat me out to her. I’m your cookie supplier.”
“Yeah, that sounds like me. Veronica makes me desperate for cookies. I’ll sell you out for chocolate chip if you don’t hand one over. I can smell them from here. I know you’re packing baked goods.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cookie he’d absconded from the vending machine. “Bullying isn’t attractive on you, Victoria. In fact, that’s more my thing.”
She caught the cookie mid-air and grabbed her coffee. “I’ll see you in the meeting, babe.”
As she reached him in the doorway, she made sure to rub against him. His body reacted, and she loved every damn second of it. While some women might fear losing their husband’s attention, as they got bigger, she didn’t.
Julian loved her pregnant.
Thank God for that.
She felt like a house, even if she really wasn’t.
“Tori!” he warned when she groped him through his jeans. It was half-hearted at the most. Julian was easy, and anytime her hands were on his body, he was fine with that.
She simply laug
hed.
There was no way the outrage was real.
She knew her husband.
“Sorry. I like my husband’s body and cookies. Blame the hormones.”
She winked at him before walking away.
Julian watched her ass all the way down the hall. Who was he to complain? His wife could sexually harass him at work all she wanted.
Screw HR.
It was good to be boss.
Harassment was mandatory when it came to her.
Heading down the hall, he stopped at the next office. It belonged to his newest member of the team. Everhart Rose was inside still setting up some pictures of his daughter and arranging his desk.
As of yet, he hadn’t been field tested, but that would be coming up soon. Being a cop was one thing.
Being a PI was a totally different beast.
He had to make the switch, Tori too.
Hell!
Half of their staff was reformed cops who had to learn how to be more effective in the private sector.
“Hey!” Hart said, glancing up from his desk. “Is it already meeting time?”
Julian took in the man before him. He was tall, bulky, and the second biggest man in the building. While Kane would likely be the resident giant, Hart was a close second.
He was also smart.
In fact, he was wicked intelligent with silvery cop eyes. They saw everything and missed nothing. Hart also had a gift. He was their resident lie detector.
That was, in their field, one hell of a skill to have, and Julian knew it.
Having him in the meetings when they talked to new clients was a good thing. He could tell them if the person trying to hire them was lying or being honest.
In their world, that was important.
“It’s just about meeting time,” he answered. “How’s Ivy settling into the new place?”
Hart grinned at the mention of his daughter’s name.
How could he not?
“She’s madly in love with Clarissa. She’s been calling her grandma.”
Julian was more than okay with that. The good thing about his mother was that she loved children. Oh, she was strict, but when it came to the little moppet, she turned to mush. It was fun to watch.
“I hope you don’t mind. I can tell her to stop if it’s an issue.”
Julian could hear it in his voice. Hart was alone in the world. He was estranged from his father. His daughter was his only relative, and she was the center of his universe. There was pain in that, and he got it. If his daughter finding a connection gave him peace, so be it.
Forbidden Secrets Page 2
