by Addison Fox
“Let him speak, Alex.” The Duke waved a hand to indicate his wishes, but other than that small gesture, he didn’t move from his position. His eyes were uncovered and Robert stared into the pale green orbs.
There was no warmth there. No humor. No humanity.
There was absolutely nothing.
And for the first time since the night Charlie had chewed his ear off in a noisy bar, Robert acknowledged he might have made a poor choice. He considered himself an enterprising businessman, but perhaps entering into a business arrangement with a man whose reputation in Dallas was legendary wasn’t the best idea.
But damn it, he’d done all he was asked. Had delivered every step of the way.
“You have one opportunity to tell me the truth.”
Robert nodded, mesmerized by the Duke’s reptilian eyes.
“Where are the contents of the box?”
“I delivered them to you.”
Alex ran the blade across the thin skin of his upper chest, and Robert screamed as the metal sliced flesh.
“I’m not a man of great patience, Mr. Barrington.”
Robert shook his head, desperate to spill as much information as he could from a mouth that had gone dry as cotton. On a hard swallow, he kept his gaze level with the Duke’s and hoped like hell he could make the man understand.
“I secured the box just as I told you. I grabbed it from the back of the pink van and ran. I came straight to your home. I never opened it.”
“Not once?”
Tears rolled freely now, spilling over his cheeks with the same cadence as the blood that rolled over his collarbone and dripped onto his pale marble countertop. “It wasn’t mine to open.”
Alex lifted the knife once more, and Robert screamed, now crying freely. “It wasn’t mine to open!”
The Duke pushed Alex out of the way and replaced the goon’s hand with his own. He was a slender man but his grip was surprisingly strong.
“There is a major piece of the collection missing. You have forty-eight hours to get it back. Nod if you understand.”
Robert nodded, willing to agree to anything. “I understand.”
The Duke’s grip remained iron-tight, his gaze just as unyielding.
Although he feared any further reprisal, Robert pushed on. Ignorance had put him in this position and he’d be a fool not to get as much detail as he could. “What piece is it? What am I looking for?”
“Wrong question, Mr. Barrington.”
The Duke never let up the pressure on his chest. Instead, he grabbed a fistful of shirt and rubbed it over the now gaping wound.
Fire erupted over his skin, and Robert screamed once more, unable to stop the noise that seemed to be dragged from the very depths of his body.
“I think it goes without saying, you’ll know it when you see it.”
Robert gulped for air, raw fire painted over his chest. As he fought to surface through the pain, one thought filled his mind.
“Cassidy?”
“Ah. Now, there’s a question, Mr. Barrington. I think you might be catching on.”
Robert reran the night before through his mind. He’d seen Cassidy and her group of boyfriends enter the building. Had followed up with Charlie’s body while they did the hard work of digging up the floor.
He’d timed it perfectly, allowing Trey and Alex to hit the front door, pushing the lot of them out the back.
Cassidy had whatever piece it was that had gone missing. That had to be it. Someone had removed it before putting it in the van.
The Duke stepped back, the pristine white cuffs of his shirt still the same pure ivory as when he’d walked in. “I suggest you become reacquainted with your former fiancée. By any means necessary.”
* * *
Cassidy stood in the center of Elegance and Lace, broom and dustpan in hand, and wondered how she could possibly be doing cleanup duty mere days after doing it for the first time. She’d already taken count of her stock, pleased to see it was blessedly untouched.
Other than the dresses she’d taken the previous evening from her office, everything was intact.
Under her breath, she muttered, “Not that anyone’s going to want to buy a dress with the lingering smell of gunpowder clinging to the silk.”
The tears that had threatened a few days before were nowhere in evidence as she took to the floor with a vengeance. Although the night before had been far more shocking than the initial break-in, she had more information this time.
More knowledge.
And knowledge was power.
Whatever was going on was clearly linked to her former brother-in-law. Cassidy knew it was unkind to think ill of the dead, but try as she might she couldn’t conjure up too many sad feelings for Charlie McCallum. He’d made his decisions and bore the consequences.
Of course, none of it changed the fact that he’d left a mark on her business. Left the residue of his broken life that she, Violet and Lilah would now bear as they worked to move forward.
They’d clean up, of course. Fix the broken windows and scrub the blood off the back stairs. But none of it could remove the lingering smear on their business.
Tucker came through the door to Lilah’s side of the business, their small hand vac in one hand and yet another trash bag full of garbage in another.
“Put me to work.” Although his words suggested otherwise, she saw the tired lines that pulled at his face.
They’d all spelled each other at various intervals throughout the morning, moving back and forth between Dragon Designs and Elegance and Lace to catch a few hours of needed sleep. No one was quite ready to go home, but the rests were a welcome reprieve from the stress of the past few days.
But as she looked over his tired eyes and drawn mouth, she knew he hadn’t bothered to take his fair share of rest.
“You’ve done so much already, I can hardly ask you to do this, too. Go on and get some rest.”
A light frown creased his brows, but he said nothing as he went to work changing out the garbage bag she’d methodically filled with glass and debris.
She watched him, the stiff set of his shoulders telling an even bigger story than his silence.
“You’re quiet.”
“Nothing to say.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’d say there’s quite a bit to say.” She focused on a swath of small shards scattered under one of the shop’s oversize love seats. “I just can’t seem to find the words.”
“You seem to find two words often enough. ‘I’m sorry.’”
Silence descended once again. “You don’t think I’m appreciative of what you’ve done? Of what Max has done? You’ve both risked far more than a bit of your time.”
“We knew what we were taking on.”
“Oh, so now you need to play the silent, suffering hero.”
He dragged the heavy bag out of the container and pulled at the ties, snapping the plastic together in harsh motions as he knotted it tight. “It’s better than playing the martyred shop owner.”
Her patience had long since frayed at the ends, and his outburst only managed to light those edges with swift sparks. “What the hell, Tucker?”
“I’ll tell you what the hell.” He tossed the garbage toward the front door, the bag making a heavy thunk as it fell. “I’m not here for your apologies. Or to be some hero. I’m here because I care. Because I give a freaking crap about what happens to you.”
“I—”
His hands came around her shoulders, and he dragged her close, then pressed her head to his chest. “I see that body lying outside the door and all I can picture in its place is you. All I can see is you.”
“I’m here. I’m fine.” She wrapped her arms around him and rubbed her hands over his back. His muscles quivered, tension stam
ped in every sinew.
“I brought you into that. Something could have happened to you while Max and I were busy playing cowboy.”
“I wanted to do this. It’s my shop. My livelihood. I have a right to be here.”
“I have a duty to protect you.”
Duty?
Cassidy knew she was as tired as he was, but something in the word had her seeing red. Shoving back, she stared at him, all the unsaid fears of the past days spilling over in an explosion.
“I’m not your duty. Or your job. Or someone you have to keep an eye on. I’m a grown woman with a business and a responsibility to that business. What kind of person would I be if I’d let you come here to fight my battles?”
“You’d be just like everyone else!”
A lifetime of hurt painted itself across his face, and she knew they were no longer talking about cleanup or business risks or even the danger that currently dogged all of them.
“What happened to you?” The words fell from her lips, a match to his question from two nights before.
“Nothing.”
She clenched her hands around the handle of the broom and fought to keep her voice level. “Tell me you don’t want to talk about it but don’t lie to me.”
His gaze settled on a spot on the far side of the room, indecision hovering around him in what looked like a stormy swirl of emotions and memories.
She’d almost convinced herself he wasn’t going to say anything—wasn’t going to let her inside that roiling sea—when he began to speak.
“My brother died when I was ten.”
Words of sympathy were nearly out when she pulled them back. There would be time for them later.
Time after he finally spilled whatever had been pent up inside for so very long.
“He was eighteen.”
“That’s a big age difference.”
“Yeah. My parents had difficulty getting pregnant between us.”
His gaze drifted to a different time and place and where she saw avoidance before, she now saw memories come alive in his eyes.
“Scott was the classic golden boy. Big and athletic, he was everything to our town.” He shook his head. “It’s cliché to say it like that, but it’s true. And my parents adored him.”
Cassidy braced herself for what came next.
“He was killed in a football accident in early fall. A freak tackle that just had too much strength in it. Came in at the wrong angle.”
As someone who’d lived her life in the state where football was king, she cringed every year when she heard the inevitable news story or two about young men who lost their lives to the sport. “The game’s dangerous. People want to dismiss that but it doesn’t make it any less true.”
When he continued to stare toward the windows, she pressed on. “What does that have to do with fighting other people’s battles?”
“Losing Scott destroyed my parents. And it should have. I know why it did—” He broke off, and she saw the very real struggle of a lifetime of guilt and disappointment.
She’d sensed hidden depths in him. Had known the easygoing personality and quick, charming smile were a veneer, layered over something darker.
“I understand why they’d lose a part of themselves when they lost their child. I didn’t understand it then but as an adult I do understand. But they gave me up in the process. Resented me for still being alive.”
“So you just tried harder.”
“For all the good it did me. No matter the grade I made or the activity I took an interest in, it was never good enough. I was never good enough. But when I refused to play football, that was the last straw.”
Her sympathy had a new target and the words she’d tried so hard to hold back as he spoke exploded with raw, blinding anger. “Why the hell would anyone think you playing football was a good idea?”
“A way to recapture Scott’s glory days? A way to restore hope? Who the hell knows.”
“Hope for who? Your parents? It certainly couldn’t have been for the town’s crestfallen hopes. You said you moved around.”
“My parents couldn’t stand to see all the places that reminded them of my brother so we bummed around to different places where one of them managed to get work.”
He turned to her then. “I’d already disappointed them enough with my focus on math and science and my desire to build things. Then I entered the military and my father had his final proof that his second son was a raging disappointment.”
“A son at West Point is a disappointment?”
“It is when expectations lie somewhere else. Funny, though, he accepts the checks I send with righteous satisfaction.”
Cassidy knew family dynamics were never easy. Hell, she’d spent a lifetime trying to figure hers out and never seemed to make much progress there.
But what his parents did to him was wrong.
No child should have to live in the shadowed pain of someone else’s shattered dreams.
Instinctively, she knew words weren’t the answer. So instead, she moved into his body, wrapping her arms tight around him.
The firestorm that blazed between them calmed, leaving only a few small embers in its wake. And when he wrapped his arms around her, Cassidy felt the last smoldering sparks wink out.
He still trembled but said nothing more as they stood there in the midst of the debris. But as she held that large, strong body against hers, Cassidy knew something had changed.
Her heart had been split wide-open and there was no closing it back up.
Chapter 15
Tucker settled into the red overstuffed cushions of Lilah’s massive sectional with a plate of canapés in his hand and a beer chilling on the coffee table before him. Lilah had insisted they all come to her house so she could cook them dinner and give everyone a chance to unwind from the past few days. Her townhome was in Dallas’s trendy Uptown neighborhood, and the moment he’d walked through the door he could see the setting fit her to a T.
Vivid walls splashed with color offset fluffy furniture and funky paintings. Add on the kitchen that would make Julia Child weep with envy and he couldn’t have designed a house more perfect for her.
Cassidy and Violet had made themselves quickly at home in the kitchen, and he and Max had taken over the living room to watch a ballgame. All in all, an easy night with friends.
If you didn’t count the lingering smell of gunfire and the memories of a dead body that haunted them all.
Oh, yeah, right. Or the fact he’d spilled his guts to Cassidy.
Damn, Buchanan. Shake it off.
Lilah had invited Bailey to join the party, and the mutt sat worshipfully at his feet, his soulful gaze on the plate in Tucker’s hand. As food choices went he couldn’t argue with small hot dogs wrapped in bacon and puff pastry. Or a home-cooked meal.
Evidently, neither could man’s best friend.
He knew he needed to get his head in the game but even the excellent food and even-more-excellent company couldn’t erase the ass he’d made of himself in front of Cassidy.
He’d never been one to second-guess himself—if he felt something he went with it—but ranting at her in the middle of her ruined shop like some love-struck schoolboy wasn’t the brightest idea he’d ever had. And telling her about his poor, pitiful past hadn’t been on the day’s agenda. Or on any day’s agenda.
Ever.
“Did you see that?” Max hollered a choice obscenity at the umpire before loading up another plate of gourmet beanie weenies. “Damn, these are good.”
Lilah floated in with another full tray. “Then have more.”
“Marry me, Lilah, and make these every day. Please.” Max slapped a hand to his heart and nearly wobbled his appetizer plate. The pup stood at the ready, and Tucker could have sworn Bail
ey already imagined the appetizers falling, like manna from heaven.
Before Lilah could answer, Violet’s voice filtered from the direction of the kitchen. “If you knew how many calories are in those you’d rethink that request. She’s a temptress of the worst kind.”
“Hey.” An affronted look covered Max’s face. “I exercise.”
Violet walked in and settled herself on the couch, a glass of white wine in her hand. “Since you’d have to run to Fort Worth and back every day I’m not sure you’re up for it, Baldwin.”
“I don’t think the devil wears pink streaks in his hair.”
Lilah laughed at that before rubbing her hands together. “Then clearly you haven’t tried my red velvet cupcakes.”
The banter was easy and the game lively as dinner cooked in the kitchen. Whether it was the jovial atmosphere or a concerted attempt to relax, Tucker wasn’t sure, but it all vanished a few minutes later when Cassidy drifted in from a small living room off the front hall.
“Cass?” Lilah moved first. “What is it?”
“Mrs. B. She was moved to a regular room and I tried calling her to see how she’s doing.”
“How is she?”
“I’m not sure. She mumbled something about being fine, told me to stay away and hung up.”
Max was the first to speak. “Was my grandfather with her?”
“I don’t know. The call was so short I didn’t get much more than what I just told you.”
Max was already up, his phone in hand. “I’ll call him.”
Lilah had barely lowered the volume on the TV when Max stomped back down the hall as fast as he left.
Tucker sat forward, disengaging himself from the deep cushions of the couch. “Was he there?”
“He’s ignoring me.”
“He could be busy.” Although contrary, Violet’s voice was gentle when she spoke. “He’ll call back.”
“I left him a message earlier, as well, and he hasn’t called—” Max broke off as his phone buzzed with an incoming text. He muttered a low curse before turning to the rest of them as he read the text out loud. “I’m fine. Talk later.”
