With the help of her friends, Trina locked up the Hamptons home and packed all her personal belongings. Everything else would be dealt with later. If Trina had any say, she wouldn’t deal with it ever again. The skeletons in the closets there seemed to come to life, and she was getting tired of jumping at her own shadow.
Shannon met Trina, Avery, Wade, and Cooper, the relief bodyguard, on the tarmac. They arranged a jet large enough to accommodate their group through Fairchild Charters, a company Trina had once worked with and had one day hoped to equip with her team of elite flight attendants. Now she was using their services as a paying customer.
Strange how life worked out sometimes.
She recognized one of the pilots when she entered the jet.
They exchanged pleasantries before she introduced him to everyone. “We’re just waiting for Reed and Lori.”
Unable to help herself, Trina assisted the flight attendant serving and did a quick check to make sure they had everything they needed for the three-and-a-half-hour flight to Texas.
The surgeon had removed the bulk of Avery’s bandages, leaving her with a small scrap of material over her nose. Most of the swelling had gone down, and the colors on her face were a nasty yellow green, but even those were looking better each morning.
The longest lasting effect was the haunted look in Avery’s eyes. Trina saw it every time Avery didn’t think anyone was watching her.
Social services at the hospital had suggested Avery see a psychologist or counselor of some sort to help deal with the aftereffects of the assault. At the time, Avery didn’t want to hear it. But maybe in a few weeks Trina could talk her into it.
“We’re here,” Lori announced as she and Reed climbed the steps into the plane.
Trina met the whites of Lori’s eyes. “Do you have the letters?”
Her smile waned. “Let’s get on our way.”
The hope in Trina’s chest sunk.
When the pilot had the jet in the air, Lori relayed her conversation with Mr. Crockett.
“He had been instructed to send the letters to a mailbox in Arizona.”
“Arizona?”
Lori nodded. “Starting six months ago.”
“Who was supposed to pick them up in Arizona?”
“Dwight didn’t know. He was assured the letters would get to you,” Lori told Trina.
“I haven’t gotten them.”
“I told him that. He seemed surprised.”
Reed unbuckled his belt and moved to the minibar, selected a bottle of water.
The flight attendant attempted to help him, but he waved her off. “I’ve already informed the team. We’ll find out who has control of the box and if the letters are just sitting there, or if Alice had another party invested in getting them to you.”
“Did he send out everything?” Trina asked Lori.
“He says there is one more letter in his possession. I asked him to hold on to it until he hears from me. In light of everything going on, he agreed.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.”
“So what’s the plan now?” Avery asked.
“I’ll get you comfortable at the ranch, and then Lori and I will go to the bank, check out whatever is in that safe deposit box.”
“I’m going to have to go home for a few days,” Shannon interjected. “I don’t want to miss any more appointments than I have to.” She paused. “Unless you need me.”
“We have it,” Avery told her. “But take a bodyguard.”
“I doubt anyone is after—”
Reed stopped her. “You’ve heard every conversation we’ve had. I’ll have someone on the ground ready to accompany you wherever you need to go until we get to the bottom of all this.”
Shannon frowned.
“Hey, at least you don’t have to worry about Scarface taking you out. Since he’s dead.” Avery’s off-color words made everyone pause.
She looked up. “What?”
“Whoever hired him isn’t,” Reed reminded her.
“Don’t you have clients to see, Lori?” Trina redirected the conversation.
“This has been more important.”
“I won’t disagree, but you need to get back to your life, too.”
“Trina—”
“I have bodyguards and Texas law behind me.”
“And me.” Wade reached out for her hand and laced his fingers through hers.
“Didn’t I hear something about a Vegas show you’re scheduled to perform?”
“I’ll cancel.”
Trina lost her smile. “No, you won’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“Wade. That’s ridiculous.”
He matched her frown with one of his own. “You are more important than a crowd full of strangers.”
As much as she wanted to fall into the image he was painting, reality kicked her. “I don’t know when things are going to settle down. You have a life, and I’ve taken you away from it since the day we met.”
“My choice.” He wasn’t backing down.
“Vegas is a short flight. You have two shows scheduled, right?”
He didn’t answer.
“Wade. Be reasonable.”
“We’ll discuss this later.”
“There isn’t anything to discuss. If things were calm, I’d go with you.”
His thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. “We’ll see.”
“Your mother hates me enough as it is. If you start canceling shows on my behalf, I’ll never get on her good side. If this is gonna work”—she pointed between the two of them—“then your mom has to tolerate me.” Trina wasn’t about to hope for more.
“What is your obsession with pleasing my mother?” he asked.
“Hey, my last mother-in-law left me a zillion dollars. It’s important.”
Wade cracked a smile. “My mother doesn’t have any money.”
“Great, then maybe I can leave her some of mine. The point is, you have a life. It isn’t all about me.”
Wade broke eye contact with her and looked around at all the faces staring at them.
“Let’s have Jeb meet you at Trina’s. We already have more security en route to your home. All I suggest is avoiding any after-parties or breaches in backstage security. Like everyone else here, you’ve been privy to all the conversations, and there is always a chance someone is watching you as closely as everyone else. But unlike the rest of us, you have a harder time blending into the background, and that will come in handy if you need help,” Reed said.
“So we’re all set.” Trina grasped Wade’s hand.
Wade grumbled but didn’t argue again.
Trina’s hands shook as she entered Interstate Bank. When she gave them her ID, she half expected them to tell her they didn’t have a box with her name on it.
They did.
She and Lori were led into the locked room full of locked boxes.
Once the bank manager left the vault, Trina found the box number that matched her key. She slid the metal container from its slot and placed it on a table at one end of the room.
“Well . . . here we go.”
Trina opened the box. Inside were two large envelopes. She opened the first and removed familiar paperwork. “Samantha’s contract.” The only proof that her and Fedor’s marriage was secured even before they said I do.
“Sasha knows about Alliance.”
Fedor would have placed the paperwork in his office safe, a safe that was virtually empty when they finally opened it just prior to closing up the house. There had been a stack of euros to the tune of fifty thousand.
Trina pushed the contracts aside and opened the second envelope. This one had several pieces of paperwork bundled together.
A photograph of Alice when she had to have been in her twenties fell out. She had a black eye and a battered soul. Along with the image was a copy of a hospital report. She used a fake name and said she’d fallen. Trina kept reading until she found a doctor’s note saying that the injury di
dn’t match the story, and that he suspected she was being abused.
Several other images through what seemed to be a couple of years followed. One had a social service referral, along with an agency in place to protect children.
“He was beating her.”
Trina kept flipping until she found an even more disturbing image, Ruslan in midswing and a woman falling to the ground. Only this wasn’t Alice, it was someone else. Tall, exotic. She couldn’t be more than twenty, if that. It was hard to judge, since the image was faded and printed on plain paper. The next two pictures were of Ruslan standing over the same woman.
The last one was of the lone woman’s lifeless body.
“Jesus.” Lori blew out a breath.
“This had to be how Alice got away from him.”
“She had something on him.”
Trina turned the paper over, and on the bottom, there was a name.
Lori removed her cell phone and started taking pictures of the images and a close-up of the name.
“The fewer people who know about this, the better,” Lori said before they left the bank.
“If I tell Wade, he might never leave.”
“Avery has had enough trauma, and Shannon needs to distance herself.”
“No texting, no phone calls. In person only and in secure places.”
Trina glanced at her purse and thought about her phone. A phone that had a bug in it so deep, it took a week to find. She now had a new phone, and the one in question was sitting at the ranch, where she wanted whoever had tracked her to think she was.
“When will we take this to the police?”
“When we can prove something. Otherwise all we do is poke the sleeping bear. And Ruslan pokes back, as Reed keeps pointing out.”
“Good thing I don’t have anywhere to be for a while.”
“Everyone vacating will give the illusion that we’ve found nothing.”
“You’re starting to sound like your boyfriend,” Trina told Lori.
“I like to think he’s starting to sound like me.”
They exited the vault and signed out of the bank before meeting Reed, who stood by the front door. He didn’t dare walk in with a sidearm attached to a holster.
“Well?” he asked once they joined him.
Lori opened her phone and showed him the pictures in silence.
Reed’s smile fell.
She pointed toward the camera at the door. “Nothing new,” she said.
“Let’s get you home, then.” He ushered them into the car and out of the parking lot.
“This stays between us,” he said without offering any other words on the subject of a dead woman at Ruslan’s hand.
“We’re one step ahead of you,” Lori told him.
Trina glanced out the back window of the SUV and wondered just how many eyes could possibly be on her at that moment.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I don’t want to leave.” Wade stood on Trina’s porch, holding her in his arms. Jeb sat in the car with the engine running to keep it cool in the Texas heat. Even though fall was nipping the air in the rest of the country, Texas didn’t get the memo.
“I know. I appreciate the thought of you wanting to stay, but it isn’t practical, Wade. My life is complicated, and it isn’t fair that I’ve monopolized yours as much as I have.”
“That’s my choice.”
“Is it? Wouldn’t you rather have taken me out dancing, made love to me out in a field somewhere, and sent me flowers in the morning instead of spending all our time in hospitals and talking to the police?”
Wade blinked a few times. “Sorry, I’m stuck on the image of you naked in a field.”
She playfully slapped his chest. “None of this, of us, has been normal.”
“Yeah, and I’m usually the cause. It’s kinda nice to have the crazy on the other side of the relationship.”
Trina smiled. “Glad I could help with that.” She slipped her hands around his waist.
He pulled her closer. “I miss you already.”
Her eyes grew misty.
“Hey . . . no tears.”
“Sorry.” She looked down.
“Don’t be. A woman crying over me is wildly exciting. But if it hurts too much, I’ll unpack my bags now.”
Trina swallowed back her mist and faked a smile. “I’m good. Besides, you need to stock up on supplies while you’re gone.” Supplies meaning condoms. They’d talked about it the night before when they burned through the last of them.
“Nawh, I’m going to see my doctor and ditch the need.”
She liked the sound of that.
He looked over his shoulder at the car before pulling her as close as two bodies could be with their clothes on.
“I’m going to miss you,” he whispered as he leaned down to kiss her.
The tears were there again, fueling her response and making her cling to him. What if he walked away and realized he didn’t want the drama anymore? What if he found Jordyn more appealing when he got home? What if his fans reminded him of all the things he would give up by having an exclusive girlfriend?
What if he didn’t come back?
She clung to him for one last taste before he broke away.
“I’ll be back,” he said against her lips.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you ran off and never looked over your shoulder,” she said but didn’t mean.
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“Good. Because I was lying. I’ll hunt you down and make you fall in love with me.” Where those words had come from, she wasn’t sure. But she didn’t regret them when they fell out of her mouth.
“Will you?”
“I can be very persuasive when determined.”
“This I can’t wait to see.”
She reached up to kiss him again.
He pulled away and leaned his forehead on hers. “If I don’t leave now, I’m not going to.”
She would never know if he would come back if she didn’t let him go.
She rubbed her hands on his chest one last time and dropped them to her sides.
“I’ll call when I get home.”
“Okay.”
He turned and jogged down the steps.
She watched his backside as he walked to the car.
“Your eyes are burning a hole in my ass, little lady.”
“Get used to it.”
He tossed his head back and laughed as he climbed into the car.
She watched as he disappeared down her driveway, and clenched her shirt over her chest. “He’ll be back,” she told herself.
“He’ll be back.”
Traffic sucked, and it took three hours to drive from Trina’s home to Wade’s ranch. It took four hours to talk his mother off the ledge. Five minutes to tell Ike one final time that he no longer needed him and remind him of the confidentiality clause in his signed contract if Ike planned on ever working again. Ike was reminded to keep anything he’d heard or seen in regards to Trina to himself. Saying goodbye to a man Wade thought was his friend wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be when he noticed how quickly Ike reminded him of the financial severance they’d agreed on if they ever parted ways.
The letters of recommendation, however, weren’t something Wade was willing to deliver.
The inner circle that included his agent and publicist was quick to smile and tell Wade whatever he wanted to hear. Which only left Jeb and his mother to tell him the truth about anything. Considering his mother’s take on things, that really only left Jeb.
“I’m counting on you to be up-front with me,” he told his bodyguard and friend.
Jeb looked around the great room. The new cameras and extra bodyguards on the ranch couldn’t be ignored.
“I trust her and her friends,” Jeb told him. “I’ll let you know if that changes. As for matters of hearts and sunsets . . . you have to determine if she’s the right fit.”
Wade didn’t skip a beat. “She already fits.”
&
nbsp; “There is one thing I like about Trina above anyone else who has been in your life.”
“Oh?”
Jeb made eye contact and didn’t break it. “She doesn’t need anything from you other than you. Not your money, your fame . . . your connections, your music. Just you. That’s a rare gift in your world. Even I need your money.” Jeb’s smile had Wade laughing.
“I appreciate your endorsement.”
“Honey?” His mother walked into the room, a familiar face following behind. “Dr. Kushman said you called him. You feeling okay?”
“Hey, Charles, thanks for coming on such short notice.”
“Anything for you, Wade.”
“Sweetheart?” His mother was all syrup and smiles once he put an end to her rant about Trina.
“I’m good, Mama. Just a checkup. No time to go into town.” Wade blew past his mother and shook the doctor’s hand. “Let’s step into my office.”
House calls were a nice perk of his fame.
By eight o’clock that night, Charles had called with a clean bill of health, and Wade was on the phone, saying good night to Trina.
“You sound even sexier over the phone,” he told her.
“I’ve been practicing all day.”
“My doctor just called, and I’m all checked out.”
“That was quick.”
“Important things are taken care of first.”
Trina laughed.
“I’ll be happy to stock up on more supplies for when I’m back from Vegas.” He secretly hoped she wouldn’t encourage him to glove up. He hadn’t forgotten what unlatexed lovin’ felt like, even though it wasn’t something he did very often in his life. Especially since he’d broken the top one hundred on the charts.
“Like I told you, I have an IUD. I’m happy to get a copy of my last bloodwork if you want to see it.”
“I trust you.” More than anyone else he’d been with. “But why the IUD, if you weren’t sleeping with Fedor?”
“I was a flight attendant. Periods got in the way.”
“That makes sense.”
“I’ll let you decide,” she told him. “I might be provoked to hunt you down if you didn’t come back, but I would never trap you.”
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