Private Justice

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I can pick you up at your place tomorrow morning,” he told her. She looked as if she was hesitating. He took a guess as to why. “If you’re worried about telling me where you live, I already know.”

  She looked surprised even though she told herself she shouldn’t be. He was the senator’s son. It seemed to be a requirement for a Kelley to know as much about everything he was dealing with as he could. Still, she had to ask. “How? You just met me.”

  “I have ways at my disposal,” he answered. “And I could have lied and told you I didn’t know. Honesty should count for something.”

  It should, she thought. And, intellectually, it did. But her nerves didn’t run on intellect. Her emotions were directly connected to that pipeline.

  Still, under normal circumstances, he did have a point. “It does,” she finally conceded. Opening the car door on her side, she got out. They were just feet away from her car; still, she automatically looked around, making sure that Dean wasn’t lurking somewhere in the shadows.

  It looked as if she was in a Dean-free zone, she thought with a sigh of relief. Stepping back, she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He nodded, then opened his window as she walked past him. “Nine o’clock all right?”

  She was an early riser, always had been. Marriage and the need to have everything prepared just so had reinforced her natural tendencies.

  “Why not eight?”

  “Eight it is,” he agreed, stifling a yawn. It had been one hell of a long day. And it wasn’t over yet.

  The sound of her heels clicking against the concrete echoed around the near-empty parking level. Now that she was out of his car, she expected Dylan to drive away. But he didn’t. Not until she’d reached her car, released the security alarm and gotten in. Only when she started her car did she see him pull away.

  Was he watching over her? Or just watching her?

  Again, she damned Dean for having destroyed her ability to simply enjoy something without feeling the need to take it apart and examine it from every angle, overanalyzing it as she searched for the flaw.

  Tomorrow, she thought. In the immortal, albeit fictitious, words of Scarlett O’Hara (or Little Orphan Annie), she’d think about it tomorrow.

  The first call Dylan made when he arrived home was to Gage Prescott, the ex-special-ops agent who was currently in the bodyguard-for-hire business. He couldn’t believe his luck when Gage answered the phone almost immediately. And the fickle goddess, Lady Luck, hadn’t exhausted her supply of fairy dust with that. The man had just come off a major assignment and was already looking for his next job.

  Conveniently devoid of any family ties, Gage could be mobile within a relatively short amount of time. That was a big plus in Dylan’s book.

  He didn’t have to tiptoe around the bodyguard or sugarcoat anything. Gage took his words as he took his punches: straight and clean.

  So, after explaining the assignment to Gage in general terms and leaving out a few of the more specific details—no need to put too many cards on the table at once, an act that the exceedingly closed-mouth Gage completely appreciated—Dylan told him to sit tight and wait for his next call. In all likelihood, he told Gage as he ended his call, the plan would get underway by the end of next week. Gage, however, would be on the payroll starting immediately.

  Gage had grunted his approval.

  Dylan’s second phone call was the one he was secretly dreading. He knew he wasn’t going to hang up until he got a confirmation, but getting one was going to be far from easy. There would be a great deal of animosity to cut through. Doing so was going to take patience and time. Neither of which he had in any great supply, especially now.

  But, schooling himself to keep both his temper and his natural good humor, he pressed the familiar, though seldom used number.

  The phone on the other end rang several times before he finally heard the receiver being picked up.

  “Yeah?”

  The abrupt greetingless response didn’t surprise him. “Cheerful as ever, I see.”

  “Dylan.” It wasn’t a question but an assumption. Though months could go by without any contact between them, there was no mistaking each other’s voices.

  There was no point in building up to this, Dylan thought. He was going to cut right to the heart of the matter. Undoubtedly, even though his twin brother was up in Montana running the ranch they both owned, Cole wasn’t so isolated that he didn’t know what was happening with their father.

  Here goes nothing.

  “Once I get a few things squared away, I’m sending Dad up to the ranch. Most likely by the end of next week.” He figured giving Cole up to fourteen days to prepare for this was all the time he could afford.

  There was silence on the other end. It went on too long.

  “Did you hear me?” Dylan finally asked.

  “I heard you,” Cole replied in his deep, unhurried voice that so often sounded deceptively disinterested. “You have another ranch somewhere?” his twin asked. “Because you sure as hell are not sending the old man here to my ranch.”

  Dylan didn’t have the time or the energy to argue. But he didn’t particularly want to have to pound this into Cole’s head, either. “The ranch is half mine,” he reminded his brother.

  Cole snorted. “Good. You can put him in your half of the barn.” He made it sound as if he was washing his hands of both of them.

  Dylan wasn’t about to be dismissed, intentionally or unintentionally. “Cole, the man’s in trouble.”

  “Yeah, I saw. He’s splashed all over the front page of the paper.”

  Sometime during the drive home, Dylan had become convinced that whatever was going on with their father, it wasn’t just about the mistresses and the supposedly missing campaign funds. There was more to it than that. He had the really strong premonition that someone was after their father—and it wasn’t just to shoot the breeze. They needed to tuck the senator away somewhere where access was limited.

  In the meantime, he needed to get to work on the investigation. The police department, he was willing to bet, really had nothing to work with.

  “No,” Dylan interrupted, “it goes a lot deeper than that.”

  Inadvertently, he’d managed to stir his brother’s curiosity. “How deep?”

  “Deep enough for me to want to hide the old man somewhere where he can’t be harmed.”

  “You think it’s come to that?” Cole wanted to know.

  “Yes, I do.” He had his brother, he hoped, on the ropes.

  Cole sighed, obviously none too happy. “Well, even so, you’ve got a whole damn country to pick from. You don’t need just one small plot of land.”

  “I need a place where I’ll know he’s going to be safe.”

  The conversation seemed to be beginning to bore Cole. “In case you’ve forgotten, this is a working ranch. I don’t have time to babysit the old man.”

  “I’ll be sending up a couple of bodyguards with him. All you have to do is to open up the house. Let them stay up there with you.”

  “’All,’” Cole echoed, mocking the very word as well as the too-innocent-sounding request. “What’ll you want for an encore? A pound of flesh?”

  “An IOU note for the pound’ll do.” And then the humor left Dylan’s voice. “This is serious, Cole. I’ve never seen the old man like this. He looks afraid.”

  “Afraid,” Cole repeated thoughtfully, trying to understand what was at work here. “As in afraid of losing his lifestyle?”

  “No,” Dylan contradicted him. “Afraid as in afraid of losing his life.”

  He could almost hear the frown forming on Cole’s face. Forming and going clear down to the bone. The frown would be a twin to the one he’d worn himself when he’d realized that he needed to bring Cole in on this. And most likely, the others as well.

  But one step at a time, he counseled himself. One step at a time.

  “When did you say he was coming?” Cole asked grudgingly.

  “Next
week. I knew I could count on you.”

  “Yeah,” Cole said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. And then he added, “You owe me. Big-time.”

  “Cole,” Dylan reminded him. “Like it or not, he is our father.”

  “Not that I ever noticed. And for the record,” he added, “I choose not.”

  “I’ll be in touch next week with the details,” Dylan promised, knowing that despite his own personal preferences to the contrary, Cole would come through for him—for them. He’d stake his life on that.

  It didn’t improve his mood any to know, as the other end of the line went dead, that was exactly what he was doing.

  Chapter 10

  If doubts about his father’s Chief Staff Assistant’s sincerity and her true intentions had occasion to cross Dylan’s mind, they quickly disappeared over the course of the next three days. After tying up several loose ends and prevailing upon a couple of associates at the law firm to take over his clients for the next couple of weeks or so, Dylan buckled down to devoting himself completely to the old man’s case.

  Cindy, as it turned out, proved to be invaluable and, for a woman who had every right to beg off due to her condition, she was also tireless. Even if she did yawn a great deal. Each day she vetoed every suggestion on his part that she call it a day early.

  It got to the point that he doubted whether she slept much at all. Except for the first day, when he picked her up, she was at the office each morning when he arrived and remained there during the course of the day, advising him about various files, supplying him with the names of people and businesses that the senator had dealings with; for all intents and purposes, she became his safari guide in this jungle that some referred to as the world of national politics.

  She seemed to have it all at her fingertips.

  “How did you get so knowledgeable?” Dylan couldn’t help asking late one evening. Weary, he paused, closing the file he had been reading.

  The office was empty except for the two of them, and the hour, ten o’clock, had nothing to do with it. The moment it had become apparent that the senator had gone into hiding, the people who made up his office staff had pragmatically begun the search for other positions.

  Cover your back was a mantra that more than one office staffer embraced.

  Times were tough and being associated with a senator who had fallen so scandalously from favor could only be seen as a bad thing. From what he’d heard, his father’s staff had almost trampled each other in their hurry to flee.

  So why hadn’t Cindy fled with the rest of them? he wondered, looking at her across the antique desk his father had bought during his very first term as senator.

  And why, looking the way she did, had the young woman voluntarily walked into this snake pit in the first place? She had the kind of face and form that models actively strove for. Killed for. But while a gorgeous face looked wonderful on the cover of a magazine, Dylan knew that in the arena of politics, her looks could ultimately just work against her.

  The simple truth of it was, there was still a prejudice against a beautiful woman. The feeling was that if she had looks, then she couldn’t possibly have the kind of brains it took to deal with complex, delicate situations.

  Cindy looked up and saw Dylan looking at her. It took her a moment to pull her mind back from the file she’d been going through and replay his question. Ordinarily, his questions all revolved around either a file or a meeting between the senator and someone he’d dealt with—supposedly on a professional level. Dylan was still pursuing the idea that the scandal had been leaked by someone who had something to gain from the senator’s ignoble fall from grace.

  Dylan hadn’t asked a personal question—other than what she wanted for lunch when he was placing a delivery order over the phone—since they had begun this investigative marathon.

  She turned his question—how had she become so knowledgeable?—over in her mind and shrugged. To her, she was still woefully underinformed. “I keep my ears opened—and I did a lot of reading. Still do.” In her opinion, she had a lifetime of reading ahead of her just to keep up.

  “Why?” he challenged. Then, before she could say something, he told her, “You should be out, enjoying yourself. Enjoying life,” he pointed out. “Not locking yourself up with dry reading matter.”

  She took a tiny part of that and twisted it around to her advantage.

  “How do you know I don’t do my reading under some shady oak tree?” she countered with a smile. “Getting fresh air and a hit for my brain cells,” she concluded. “And if your next question is why am I here, the answer’s easy. It’s because I want to make a difference. Life isn’t some endless frat party, it’s responsibilities heaped on top of more responsibilities. Nobody gets a free pass.” That was something she firmly believed. “One way or another, we all wind up paying.”

  She was thinking of the baby, Dylan guessed. If she was so dead-set against it, if she was doing what she could to remain in denial about her condition, then what was she going to do about it when it grew more demanding? The time in which denial stood her in good stead was growing shorter by the day.

  Was she thinking of giving the baby up for adoption? Had she looked into some agency, or was she considering a private adoption?

  Questions burned on his tongue, but he knew he had no right to ask. His father was his problem, not Cindy’s situation.

  Still, he couldn’t help thinking that Cindy Jensen was a bit of an enigma. A complex woman. There was nothing straightforward about her, despite that sweet, innocent-looking face.

  “Everyone else associated with this campaign, this office, is scrambling to find other work with another senator or congressman. As far as the senator’s career goes, they’re convinced that the fat lady has sung. So why are you still here?” he asked again.

  He wanted to know what made her tick, what motivated her. It had been a long time since he’d felt this amount of curiosity about a woman. But, he was beginning to realize, Cindy Jensen was no ordinary woman. She was an intriguing dynamo.

  “Maybe I’m just tone-deaf,” she suggested, keeping a straight face. “Or maybe it’s not the fat lady they heard but just some coyote howling at the moon. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra,” she began, reaching for her all-time favorite quote, words she chose to live by, “‘It ain’t over ’til it’s over.’ And I don’t think it’s over,” she tacked on in case he missed her meaning.

  She’d always loved that line. It was what she had clung to whenever she felt in danger of being down-and-out. That wasn’t hard, seeing as how she was a single, abused, mother-to-be of a child she had no desire to hold. A child whose life, a life she was, even now, terrified of messing up, had been conceived in violence.

  “What do you hope to get out of this?” Dylan asked her.

  “‘Get out of this?’” she echoed. Why would he ask something like that? “I hope to get the senator out of this—help bail him out and get him back on his feet again so he can go back to dealing with the public and making his contribution.”

  Dylan leaned back, listening to her speak. The people he worked with were self-absorbed, one worse that the other. It was nice being away from that. Even if it was only for a little while. She was a breath of fresh air—if she was on the level.

  “And that’s enough?” he questioned.

  “It is for me,” she assured him. “Look, you don’t seem to like your father very much,” she observed. “But I do.” She saw the glimmer of suspicion in his eyes again and immediately set him straight. “No, not in that way. I respect him a great deal. I think he’s done a lot of good for his constituents and I think that, despite opinions to the contrary, he still has a lot to give.

  “And I think you’re right,” she went on. “I think that someone is out to destroy the senator. I don’t know why, I just know that if there’s anything, anything at all, that I can do to prevent that, then I’m ready to jump in and come to his rescue.”

  Dylan sat mystified, listening to
her. If she was acting, then she deserved an Academy Award right here, right now.

  “My father’s lucky to have you,” Dylan told her.

  That wasn’t the way she saw it. “I was lucky to have him,” she countered. Since her statement probably stirred up more questions than it put to rest, she decided to tell him just a little more of the reason she was so loyal to his father, building on what she’d mentioned to him the other day.

  “When my marriage was falling apart, it was your father who stepped in and gave me someone to lean on.” This was hard for her, but she was the one who had started it. To end it abruptly wouldn’t have been right. “I don’t have a family. Your father provided me with the kind of emotional support that I needed in order to send my ex packing.”

  “No family,” Dylan repeated. “Your parents weren’t around?” He knew he was pushing her, but this small opening might be the only opportunity he’d get to ask her questions.

  He saw her flush and realized he’d overstepped his boundary. He was about to apologize when Cindy answered his question. “My mother died when I was around four.”

  “And your father?”

  Her shoulders rose and then fell in a vague, careless shrug. “Might be dead. Might still be alive. I really don’t know. He deposited me at a local fire station, gave me a five-dollar bill to clutch in my hand and took off. I was four at the time. The firemen turned me over to social services. That was the only life I knew until I turned eighteen.”

  There was only one conclusion to be drawn from her statement. But even as he said it, he couldn’t fathom turning his back on the sad-eyed little girl she must have been.

  “You weren’t adopted?”

  “No. But that was because, technically, I wasn’t an orphan. My father hadn’t written away his ‘rights’ to me. He could still come back and claim me—not that he would have. To avoid any of the legal hassles that might crop up for the agency I was never in the running for adoptive parents.”

  He couldn’t imagine what that had been like. Being alone like that. Granted he’d had a no-show father, but his mother had been there when he was growing up. And his brothers and Lana had always been there for him. That meant a lot.