Private Justice

by Marie Ferrarella

  But, life with her ex had taught her one very important thing—other than not to trust her heart—never take anything for granted. It was always best to have things spelled out beforehand.

  She glanced into the oversize purse to make sure she had everything, then slipped it onto her shoulder. “If you drive me, how will I get back here once you’re finished talking to the senator?”

  Cindy Jensen struck him as an intelligent woman, he thought, so the fact that she didn’t just assume what he was about to tell her made him wonder about the kind of people she was used to dealing with. Did they just run out on her whenever the whim hit?

  “I’ll drive you back,” he told her cheerfully. “Why? Did you think I’d leave you stranded? I’m not that kind of a guy,” he assured her.

  She was going to have to trust him. Besides, she reasoned, she could always call a cab. “Frankly, I have no idea what kind of a guy you are, Mr. Kelley,” she informed him coolly.

  “One who likes to be called Dylan instead of Mr. Kelley,” he told her. “As for not knowing the kind of person I am, while we’re going to the estate, I’ll do my best to fill you in. Go ahead,” he urged as they walked out of the suite of offices housed within a much larger shell, “ask me anything.”

  Out in the hallway, Dylan started to lead the way to the elevators. He was surprised when his father’s assistant caught hold of his arm, halting him in mid stride. When he looked at her quizzically, she wasn’t moving.

  “Not that way,” she told him, indicating the elevator with a nod of her head. “The reporters are all over the ground floor by now, waiting to pounce on anyone remotely attached to the senator. No telling when we’d be free of them if they waylay us coming out of the elevator. We’ll take the back stairs.”

  Turning on his heel, he followed her toward the stairwell. “And no one will be waiting to ambush us there?” he asked skeptically.

  She knew it sounded rather strange. “You’d be surprised at how simplistic and tunnel-visioned these reporters can be. They assume the people they’re tracking are lazy and incapable of eluding someone of their intellectual caliber.”

  A flicker of admiration passed over his face. Dylan held the stairwell door open for her. “You’ve done this before.”

  She supposed her smile was a tad smug. “Once or twice.”

  “For my father?” he asked. Dylan couldn’t remember there being an occasion for a media feeding frenzy of this magnitude before. Until now, the old man had led a charmed life. There might have been vague rumors every now and then, but nothing serious had ever stuck.

  Cindy debated just ignoring his question, then decided that there was no reason to hide anything. “I started out working for Josh Sawyer.”

  “The actor?” When she nodded in response, he had to admit he was somewhat impressed. And curious. “Why did you switch jobs?”

  She saw no point in mentioning Dean, or his ever-growing jealous streak and the marks it eventually began to leave on her. Or that, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Dean liked having money so much, he would have kept her barefoot and housebound.

  God, what an idiot she’d been ever to have thought she actually loved that man. Dean didn’t know the meaning of the word. The sentiment was completely wasted on him.

  “The senator needed someone to fill a vacancy on his staff and Josh Sawyer had suddenly decided to change his home base. He wanted to be seen as an international celebrity, so he was going to move abroad. That had no allure for me,” she said, raising her voice ever so slightly in order to be heard above the click of her heels on the metal stairs. “Me, I like being in the United States.”

  He could easily understand that. What he couldn’t understand was why someone of her intelligence could remain working for his father like some lackey with a sixth-grade education. Unless, of course, it was because of the obvious reason—that his father’s power and position, not to mention his eternal gift of gab, had seduced her.

  And kept on seducing her.

  It wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on for the time being.

  Once out of the stairwell, Dylan led the way through the parking structure until he reached his car. The vehicle was parked on the far side of the very first level.

  Pressing a button on his key ring, he unlocked the vehicle when they were still several yards away. All four locks popped to attention.

  He crossed to the passenger side and held the door open for her. “Why do you stay with him?” he wanted to know. She’d made him really curious. He just couldn’t picture his father and the young woman in the same conversation, much less locked in a clinch, panting and sweaty in bed.

  He had manners, Cindy thought. He held her door open as she got into the vehicle. Unusual for someone who seemed to come on so brashly. She waited until she buckled up before answering him.

  “Because I believe in what the senator stands for. Because he’s passionate.”

  Getting in on the driver’s side, Dylan looked at her. “Yeah, I’ll just bet.”

  Her resentment flared instantly. He’d just convicted her of a crime without so much as doing her the courtesy of questioning her. Whatever had happened to innocent until proven guilty? Was that just a platitude, or was that something reserved for people this annoying man actually liked?

  “I mean about his political principles,” she informed Dylan coolly.

  Her eyes narrowed. Maybe she should tell him that she’d changed her mind about coming with him. Maybe this was the perfect opportunity to get out. The thought of being trapped in his car, enduring his thinly veiled contempt, held absolutely no appeal to her.

  Her regard appeared to Dylan to be less than friendly as she said, “I don’t think I like what you’re implying.”

  Okay, maybe he had been out of line, but he had a feeling that he probably hadn’t. To be fair, he gave her the opportunity to convince him. His eyes all but penetrated her skin, going clear down to the spine. Only then, acting as a human lie detector, did he continue talking. “You’re telling me that you weren’t involved with my father.”

  “Of course I was—and am—involved with your father. I work for the man. I have been working for him for the last two years. I’m ‘involved’ in every aspect of the senator’s political life.”

  That wasn’t what he meant and she knew it. Since she seemed determined to play this game of semantics, he gave it one more try. “And what about his private one? Are you involved in that as well?”

  He didn’t let up, did he? Well, she wasn’t about to admit to something that wasn’t true, no matter how many ways he framed his question.

  Cindy gave him a look that would have frozen hell over, then said, “I don’t have to dignify that with an answer—but I will.” For what had to be the fourth time, she repeated her official title. “I am the senator’s Chief Staff Assistant. I coordinate his meetings, take care of his flight arrangements. Make sure he gets to his meetings and interviews on time and is prepared. That means making sure he has his speeches with him and is apprised of everything he needs to know for whatever the occasion, be it a press conference or the opening of a new supermarket. But when the senator goes home for the night and closes his door, my job ends.” Running out of breath, she said, “Am I making myself clear?” She’d pretty much had just about enough of this.

  Dylan’s mouth curved. He caught himself liking her spirit—and really hoping she was telling him the truth. Because that made things a lot less complicated.

  He nodded his head. “Very.”

  She couldn’t tell if he actually believed her or had just stepped back to keep from turning this into an argument. Nothing in his tone gave her any indication of what he was thinking—or feeling.

  She took a guess. “You don’t believe me.”

  While he would have liked to believe that she was as innocent as she pretended to be, Dylan couldn’t quite get himself to buy what she’d just told him. Not in light of what he knew about his father. The man had a wandering eye, an
d, in his place, Dylan knew that he damn well wouldn’t go shopping for meals in another city when he could have a home-cooked one right here, courtesy of his rather sexy, intriguing staff assistant.

  He answered her honestly. He had no interest in playing games. “I don’t see how, given the way you look, my father could keep his hands off you.”

  The blunt statement took her breath away for a moment. Cindy was torn between feeling flattered and being insulted.

  Six of one, half a dozen of the other, she thought, deciding to take the middle ground. She took his assessment of her looks as a compliment, but was insulted by what he seemed to think of her morals. He had no idea about her marital status, but it was a known fact that his father was married. What kind of a woman would she be, having an affair with a married man?

  The senator’s less-than-endearing son needed to be educated about some basic points, and she might as well be the one to do it, especially since there appeared to be no one else available for the job.

  “Number one—the senator is not the rutting pig that everyone seems to think he is. I’ve never walked in on him in a compromising position, never had any occasion to suspect that he was engaged in anything immoral—until this story broke.” And, she had to admit, the evidence was pretty damning, but she was going to reserve judgment until she had more proof one way or another. “And number two—what makes you think I’m such a pushover that all he has to do is crook his finger and I’d jump into his bed? My morals, I’ll have you know, are completely intact, thank you very much. I don’t jump into anyone’s bed, least of all the senator’s.”

  “Good for you.” Why did the image of her leaping into a bed seem so damn appealing? And so vivid? “And to answer your question as to why I’d think you’d ‘jump’ into his bed, it’s because my father is pretty damn charismatic. The man could charm the fur off a fox if he set his mind to it.”

  She raised her chin slightly. Defiantly. “Lucky for me I’m not a fox.”

  That same fire in her eyes made her seem even more compelling and attractive than she already was. The old-fashioned description “spitfire” flashed through his mind out of nowhere. That was an apt, succinct description of her, he thought. Once again he regretted that they’d met under these circumstances.

  But then, if it hadn’t been for these circumstances, there would have been no reason for him to have anything to do with his father’s world and he wouldn’t have met her anyway.

  He thought of what she’d just said about not being a fox. “I’d say that’s lucky for both of us.”

  She looked at him in amused disbelief. Was he coming on to her? Or had all this talk about whether she was part of the senator’s love life made her irrationally sensitive, anticipating things that weren’t about to happen?

  “Do women usually respond to that line?” she asked him.

  It hadn’t been a line, it had been the first thing that came into his head because he was happy that she wasn’t one of his father’s little playmates. That she was better than that, smarter than that.

  What did it matter what she was? a voice in his head asked. He didn’t attempt to fashion an answer.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he replied, looking back at the road. “I don’t use lines.”

  He could have sworn he heard her smile.

  L.A. traffic, never good, was relatively decent around this time, at least today, and they made it to his father’s Beverly Hills estate within the hour, as promised.

  Just as he’d anticipated, the immediate area before the tall, imposing gates was filled to bursting with parked news vans and milling-about, restless reporters.

  He felt the woman beside him stiffen as they came closer to the scene.

  It was obvious from her reaction that she hadn’t anticipated this much of a crowd. “Omigod,” she murmured in stunned disbelief.

  The smile on his lips had no mirth behind it. “A little staggering, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t these people have anything better to do?” It was a rhetorical question, brimming with anger that had yet to spill out.

  While she was angry at the senator for doing this to himself, to his family, and for disappointing her, she was even angrier at the media for turning him into prey, reducing him to hiding and sneaking around like a common criminal.

  “Apparently not,” Dylan answered. “It appears that my illustrious father is the story of the hour. Most likely of the week and maybe even of the month as well. The media likes to squeeze a story dry, holding it up to the light, examining it from every possible angle and getting everything they can out of it before tossing it aside, a shell of what it once was as they move on.”

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he drove by, neither speeding up nor slowing down, determined not to do anything to draw their attention to him. There were so many different reporters from so many different venues, he gave up trying to do a head count.

  “All we can hope for,” he told Cindy, “is that some bigger, juicier scandal crops up on the horizon sooner rather than later.”

  He heard her sigh in response. Glancing in her direction, he saw her shaking her head. The look on her face was one of a deep, pervading sadness. She really appeared to be upset by all this, he thought. He concluded that her soul hadn’t been jaded yet. He wondered how long it would be before it was.

  “You didn’t have to come,” he pointed out as he continued driving, past the estate’s entrance.

  “Yes, I did,” she insisted with feeling. “In the face of all this, it’s obvious he needs to feel that someone’s on his side. Besides you,” she added, not wanting to insult him. He didn’t, after all, have to be here no matter how much he protested.

  “I’m not on his side,” Dylan reminded her. “I just want to get this resolved with as little bloodletting as possible and move on.”

  “Speaking of moving, exactly where are you going?” she asked him. “The mansion,” turning her head, she nodded toward it, “is back there.”

  “Yes, I know,” he answered, unfazed. “A mile down the road is Dr. Richard McCallum’s house. Actually, it’s more like a palace, but for the purposes of narrative, I’ll call it a house—”

  Impatient, she wanted him to get to the point. “You can call it Edgar if you want,” she said tersely. “What does it have to do with my question?”

  “I’m getting to that,” he said, deliberately enunciating every word.

  He had no idea why, but he got a kick out of sparring with her. He supposed it was the adult equivalent of pulling her pigtails and running.

  The exasperated look she gave him said he was playing on her last nerve. Dylan sped up his answer. “There’s a passageway that runs between the good doctor’s house and the evil senator’s house,” he told her whimsically. “I’m going there so that we can go back to my father’s place without having to fight our way through a wall of reporters.”

  She looked at him a little uncertainly. “And you’re sure about this secret passageway?”

  “I’m sure. As kids, my brothers and I used to pretend we were pirates. We’d bury our ‘treasure’ in the doctor’s garden by coming from ours and using the secret passageway. Of course, that meant we had to let the doctor’s annoyingly gawky daughter play with us, but it was a small price to pay for feeding our fantasies.”

  That sounded like a colorful—and satisfying—childhood to her. “Well, you don’t seem to have suffered too much as the senator’s son.”

  “I didn’t,” he agreed. “Until I was old enough to understand that most kids had fathers who did more than pose for pictures with them before taking off for weeks, sometimes months, at a time.”

  They were on the doctor’s property now. Within a couple of minutes, Dylan was pulling the car up before a towering structure that actually did resemble a medieval castle, right down to the stones artfully placed one on top of another to give it a genuine appearance.

  Getting out, he waved at someone within “the palace” before coming ar
ound to her side of the vehicle. Not standing on ceremony, Cindy had already gotten out.

  Squinting, she tried to make out who Dylan had just waved at. She didn’t see anyone. “Waving at the doctor’s daughter?” she guessed, amused.

  “At his butler.” She looked at him in surprise. “Spooky guy seems to have no life beyond standing in the foyer, watching the air move and, on occasion, opening the door. For this, I hear, he’s paid rather well. It feeds the doctor’s own fantasies,” he explained. “Not everyone can afford to have a British butler opening their front door for them.”

  Cindy was beginning to think that Dylan Kelley had had a very strange upbringing after all.

  He barely rang the doorbell—which sounded like the chimes at Westminster Abbey—before the massive doors opened.

  A tall, gaunt, balding, almost anemic-looking older man stood in the space. He was dressed in black livery. The white shirt was a stark contrast, bringing her attention to his pallor. He had an incredibly pale complexion that a vampire would have envied.

  “Hello, Wakefield. I’ll need to make use of the passageway.”

  The butler didn’t look surprised or ruffled. Instead, he nodded as if this were an everyday request rather than a rare event.

  “Of course, Master Cole,” he said through thin, bloodless lips that appeared to be barely moving. “You know where it is.”

  Not bothering to correct the man, Dylan just nodded and went on his way. “I do. And thanks.”

  Cindy realized he had her by the hand and was towing her behind him. When had he taken her hand? Moreover, why had the old butler called him by a wrong name?

  Deliberately removing her hand from his, Cindy said, “He called you Cole. Why would he do that?”

  “Because I have a twin brother named Cole.”

  A twin brother. What else was going to pop out at her?