JOSS: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security)

by Glenna Sinclair

  It think that last bit was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for Nicolas. He’d thought Aurora’s mother, Virginia, liked him. He thought that she was one of a few people who understood Aurora’s drug issues. I think he honestly envisioned her testifying on his behalf if this thing ever went to trial. But then she attended a press conference with the district attorney a couple of days after Nicolas’ arrest. It was difficult to watch, even for me.

  “My daughter was not an angel,” Virginia had said. “She made mistakes in her life. And one of those mistakes was to marry a man she’d only known for a few months, running away to some island resort to elope like a couple of teenagers.” She began to cry at that point, huge teardrops cascading down her face and ruining her carefully applied makeup. “His accusations of drug use are ridiculous. My daughter never would have touched the stuff if not for the people he introduced her to, if not for the world he made her a part of. If anyone was using drugs, it was Nicolas Costa. And I believe with every fiber of my being that he is responsible for my daughter’s death.”

  I could see Nicolas’ spirit darken as he watched. And then he walked away, stepping into the first dark mood I witnessed. But it wasn’t the first and, I was pretty sure that until this whole ordeal was over, it wouldn’t be the last.

  He came over and sat on the edge of the bed, his laptop bag strapped over his neck and shoulder.

  “I need to work. Just sitting around here, worrying about the babies and this…” He sighed as he stroked my cheek. “Please, don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

  I sat up and slid closer to him, adjusting my hips to make room for my massive belly. Twenty-three weeks and I already felt like it was time. I couldn’t imagine how hard it was going to be when I was thirty-five weeks, let alone forty.

  Nicolas ran his hand over my bare belly, smiling softly when one of the babies kicked his fingers. Then, his hand moved up to my breast, cupping it softly, his palm tickling my nipple.

  “I’ll be back late,” he said, leaning close to kiss me.

  “Be careful,” I said.

  He glanced at me as he stood, a little defiance in his eyes. But he just nodded as he headed for the door.

  I lay back and ran my hands over my belly. The babies kicked, one shoving something—a foot or an elbow—against my ribs, the other dancing on my bladder. I was so excited when they began to move, but now I sometimes wished they would stop. And then I felt guilty for that because it was like wishing they didn’t exist and I would never wish that.

  I liked lying in Nicolas’ bed. Not that it was any different from the bed in my room. The sheets were the same Egyptian cotton, the pillows an amazing down. However, Nicolas’ bed smelled like him. When I snuggled down under the sheets, it was like being enveloped in Nicolas’ arms. Not that Nicolas would be content to just lay here with me. The only time he seemed to want to cuddle was when the babies were moving and he wanted to feel a part of it, or when he wanted sex.

  It was kind of sad, really.

  I lay there for a long time, feeling the babies wiggle and play together. I think they were already fighting over space, but I wasn’t quite sure. But I knew I couldn’t stay there all day. Constance would eventually come find me and insist I eat something. She seemed to understand the whole gestational diabetes thing better than I did. All I knew was that I needed shots at particular times a day. And Constance—when Nicolas wasn’t interested—was always there with a filled syringe when one was due. I didn’t even have to think about the foods I ate because Constance had my every meal thought out days in advance. It was like having my mother back.

  I climbed out of bed and made my way to the bathroom. I should have gone to the hall bath that I normally used—and where all my toiletries were—but I really liked Nicolas’ walk-through shower. There were five showerheads and each one was positioned perfectly to hit my body in just the right place. And I liked the liquid soap he used—it smelled just like him—and the shampoo made my hair look like someone else’s, someone who has long, luxurious hair.

  As I stood under the spray, I wondered what life was going to be like now that Nicolas was working on his new movie. I’d probably be relegated to the guest room again. There were only seventeen weeks until the babies were due, and Dr. Bishop said they would likely come between thirty-five and thirty-seven weeks, so that was only twelve weeks away. Three months. And then…

  I didn’t like thinking about what would happen then.

  I still didn’t know how Nicolas felt about me. I wasn’t even sure he considered me when he thought about the babies and their future. I was just the surrogate. But then…the way he touched me sometimes, the way he made love to me, it made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, there was more to us than I thought there was.

  Was there a chance?

  But not if he went to jail. The lawyers called every few days, assuring Nicolas that nothing would come of it. The district attorney didn’t have enough to go to trial. Yet, this thing was still taking a toll on Nicolas. I could see it. He wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t eat. He threw himself into this new movie over the last week, talking on the phone for hours with his crew, discussing locations and scenes and how he was going to be able to direct scenes set to take place in Canada and Kentucky. He needed the distraction, I could see that. But I worried just the same.

  I climbed out of the shower and slowly went about my morning routine. I was looking through the drawers under the counter to see if Nicolas had an extra toothbrush hidden somewhere. I didn’t want to have to go to the hall bath to get my own. Instead of a toothbrush, however, I pulled a drawer open too hard and it came free of the counter. Combs and a hairbrush, tissue packs and shampoo samples, bottles of sleep aids and heartburn meds flew across the floor. I groaned, not really in a position to get down on my hands and knees to gather it all up. My belly was just making me too ungainly for that sort of thing. I thought about calling Constance or one of the maids, and then I was ashamed because that was something one of the snooty women my mother worked for would have done.

  With a sigh, I slowly lowered myself to my knees. I gathered the stuff closest to me, then turned over the drawer to pile it back inside. But there was something wrong with the drawer. I leaned back against the counter and stared at it. There was a corner of the drawer’s bottom that was sticking up at a weird angle. And underneath it, the edge of a plastic bag was sticking out.

  I tugged at the bag and pulled it free. My heart sank when I saw what was inside.

  It was a bag of pills, long, narrow pills that said Xanax on one side and had a large two on the other. I just stared at it for a long time, telling myself that it was Aurora’s, that she hid it here to keep any of the maids from knowing that she was taking them. And that idea seemed likely when I tugged at the corner of the drawer’s false bottom and found more drugs. There were half a dozen baggies like the one with the Xanax, but they held pills of all colors and sizes. And there was a tiny envelope filled with a white powder and another with an amber-colored ball inside. I had a good idea that the powder was cocaine. I wasn’t quite sure about the amber ball, but suspected it could be something like meth or crack cocaine.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My first instinct was to call Nicolas. To confront him and demand to know who these drugs belonged to. They couldn’t be his, right? They had to be Aurora’s. But the stuff on top of it was all Nicolas’. I’d seen him use these combs and the hairbrush. And he joked about the shampoo samples he took from hotel rooms he’d stayed in, a habit he developed early in his career that he couldn’t seem to shake. Would he really put his stuff in a drawer with a false bottom? Did he know about the false bottom? I hadn’t noticed it, but I didn’t open these drawers every day like he did. Shouldn’t he have noticed?

  I wasn’t sure. But there was something wrong about this. The Xanax bothered me the most. This was the drug the police said Nicolas killed Aurora with. That he slipped it into her drink. Finding a bag here, in his hou
se, didn’t seem good. Was it proof that Nicolas had done what they said? No. But it didn’t seem to scream innocence, either.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  “Oh, Dios mio!”

  I quickly slipped the bag of Xanax under my hip as Constance came into the room, one of my insulin syringes in her hand.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “The drawer fell and this stuff was hidden under the bottom.”

  “Oh, cojeme!”

  “Constance!”

  I couldn’t believe that word had come out of her mouth. I had never once, in all the years I’d known Constance—and I’d known her since I was a toddler—heard her swear. And that word…did she have to choose the worst swear word out there?

  “This is not good,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest as though she was having pain there. “If the police find this—”

  “The only way they could do that would be if one of us said something.”

  “What are we supposed to do? We can’t just put it back.”

  “Why not?”

  Constance shot me a dark look. “Because we’d know it’s there.”

  “By accident.”

  “But we still know. You can’t put it back.”

  “Then what do you suggest we do?”

  Constance shook her head, her eyes moving almost wildly over the pile of drugs resting now in my lap. She stooped down and picked up the drawer and the false bottom I’d popped out. She studied them both like an answer might be written on them. There obviously wasn’t. She set them on the counter and began gathering the other items—the combs and tissues and over-the-counter pills—and tossed them back into the drawer, popping it into its space in the counter without the false bottom. The she grabbed a hand towel and gathered the baggies still resting on my lap. I pulled myself carefully to my feet, sliding the baggy of Xanax into the pocket of Nicolas’ bathrobe that I’d put on when I got out of the shower.

  “What are you going to do with all of that?”

  Constance carefully tied a knot into the towel to keep the baggies from slipping out. “I’m going to give it to Adam. He’ll know what to do with it.” She set the towel on the countertop and began opening drawers and searching through them. I stepped back as she moved around me to get to the drawers behind me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making sure there isn’t any more.”

  “Why would there be?”

  Constance shot me that don’t-be-stupid look that was growing more and more familiar to me these days.

  “You don’t think these are Nicolas’, do you?”

  She didn’t answer and that was answer enough. I crossed my arms over my chest as I watched her. She must have felt my gaze because she said, “Give yourself that shot while you’re just standing there, doing nothing.”

  Like a child who doesn’t know how to stand up to her mother, I grabbed the syringe she’d set on the corner of the sink and bared my hip, injecting the small amount of medication into the fatty area just behind my hip bone. It burned—I don’t know if it was something about the insulin or just my fear of needles, but it burned every time. I pressed the needle against the counter to bend it so no one would accidentally poke themselves and left it there.

  I wasn’t going to help Constance search through Nicolas’ things. It seemed like a terrible violation of his privacy. I mean, it was only sticks of deodorant and extra toothpaste that Constance probably bought and deposited there herself, but it still felt like an intrusion. Instead, I grabbed the slacks and blouse I’d been wearing last night when Nicolas invited me into his room and slid them back on. I managed to get the bag of Xanax into my pocket just before Constance came into the room, that overburdened towel in her hands.

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “No,” she said, the word short and clipped. She clearly didn’t like being questioned.

  “Have you ever found anything like that here before?” I asked, unable to resist.

  “A few times.”

  That got my attention.

  “When?” I demanded.

  Constance just shook her head. “I have to go call Adam. You should probably go wash your hands and put on some clean clothes.”

  I jumped off the bed—as gracefully as my swollen belly would allow—and grabbed her shoulder before she could leave the room.

  “When did you find drugs in here? When Aurora was here?”

  “No, Ana.” She turned toward me, sadness in her eyes. “I know you like him.” Her eyes jumped to the bed behind me, to the sheets that were so disarranged that they told a story that I might have been ashamed of if it hadn’t been so good. “But there are things about him you don’t know. The sooner you have those babies and get out of this house, the better.”

  “You used to talk about what a great man he was. You said he was the kindest person you’d ever worked for.”

  “I did. And it was true, back then, before he married that woman. But it doesn’t mean he was a saint.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  Constance touched my cheek lightly. “I love you like you were my own, mija. But this is something that you should hear from him.”

  “Constance…?”

  “Go wash your hands. You don’t want to get any of this poison in your bloodstream. There’s no telling what it might do to the babies.”

  She walked away, leaving me alone with words that left a heavy stone tied around my heart.

  Chapter 19

  I lay in bed almost a week later, the bag of Xanax in my hands. Constance hadn’t said another word about the drugs and Nicolas hadn’t mentioned it. Not that I’d seen much of Nicolas. He was working a full day, from dawn until late into the night, sometimes only coming back to the house for a shower and a shave before he went right back to work. I wasn’t sure how he did it, but then I was afraid I did.

  What if everything Nicolas had told me was a lie? Was it possible he was a drug addict? Was it possible he lied about Aurora’s addiction, covering for his own actions? It didn’t make sense, to be honest. It never really had. The Aurora I met was so different from the woman Nicolas talked about.

  There was one meeting, not long after our first, when Aurora seemed a little off. We met at her country club where she was waiting for a tennis partner to show up. I remember she called me in a hurry that morning, asked me if it would be okay if we met during my lunch hour.

  “I have a meeting tonight and then I’m flying to Paris in the morning for a photoshoot for this movie we start filming in a few months. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” I said, thinking how glamorous her life seemed. I always wanted to travel, and she mentioned Paris like it was just a nuisance she couldn’t get out from under.

  “I can’t imagine what you think of me,” she’d said, almost as though she could read my thoughts. “Here I am planning to have a child and I can’t even clear a moment in my schedule to talk to you about the doctor who’s going to do all the medical stuff for this.”

  “It’s fine,” I remembered saying.

  “Fine,” Aurora sighed. “That’s a word I don’t hear often. It’s blasphemy in this house. Can you believe that?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Blasphemy to say ‘fine’? It just didn’t make sense. But Aurora was often saying things that didn’t make sense. There was another time, just a week or so before the implantation appointment when I asked if Nicolas would be at our next meeting—I think it was the day I was to sign the last of the paperwork—and she told me he was with his friend Bill. And then she laughed almost hysterically.

  “Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, so I just agreed with her that it was ridiculous and she changed the subject.

  Aurora was a beautiful woman who was used to getting everything she wanted when she wanted it. She knew how to flirt, how to be charming, how to be everything a man needed her to be. B
ut she never really learned how to act around women. It was that, the latter, that I assumed was the reason for some of her odd behavior.

  Was I wrong?

  I leaned over and shoved the bag of Xanax into the nightstand drawer, still not sure what I was doing with it. I needed to get rid of it, but I wasn’t sure how. They were always running those little things on television telling people not to put unused medication down the toilet because it was getting into the water supply. But I didn’t know how else to get rid of it. I could give it to Adam, but I was afraid he would recognize the significance of it as much as I did. Some part of me that still whole heartedly believed that Nicolas was innocent didn’t want to run the risk that Adam, one of Nicolas’ oldest allies, might turn on him given the opportunity. I wasn’t really sure Adam would, but even the smallest doubts sometimes grew into huge, unignorable truths. Nicolas needed all the support he could get right now.

  But I couldn’t just keep it. What if the police came to search the house again?

  The last time, it was such a mess afterward that Constance was still complaining about it. Drawers dug through, plants turned out of their pots, books taken from their shelves and left piled on the floor. Nicolas’ laptop was still in the police evidence locker, waiting to see what might happen with the district attorney. If they came again, Constance might force the whole group of them to commit hari-kari. But they might also find the Xanax and that would definitely not be good.

  I closed my eyes, my hands restlessly moving over my belly. One of the babies immediately kicked, forcing my hand to bounce a little.

  “It’s okay, baby,” I said softly. “I won’t let anything happen to your daddy.”

  Almost as though he’d heard me, Nicolas tapped on the door and stuck his head inside. “You asleep?”

  “No. Come in.”

  He looked absolutely exhausted. There were dark circles under his eyes and a slope to his shoulders like he was carrying an incredibly heavy weight. I slid out of the center of the bed and pulled the sheet back, making room for him.