by Jolie Day
“And what about me?” Mira felt surprisingly calm. Or was this still the lack of emotion she had felt for the last few days now? And then she understood. The two men had a plan.
And at the center of this plan they had decided that she would be the bait to lure the killer out of his hiding.
Chapter 23
Before Peter left, the two men looked at George’s email together. The attached document, which had been sent with the email, was ten pages long and Mira knew it almost by heart, having read it many times. She sat across from them and watched them as they read what George had sent her.
“This man literally died for nothing,” Connor then said after he had read the attachment all the way through. Mira felt her eyes fill with tears. She had thought the exact same thing. The old attorney had written nothing other than a wild combination of speculations that could not be proven and maybe he had thrown in a few names that had all already been officially added to the court case papers. He had not only been wrong about Connor’s involvement in this case, but he had also gone so far as to suspect Suzanne and Russell as well. This was the point that Mira found particularly interesting, however, because Peter and Connor didn’t seem to be surprised at all.
“He played a daring hand,” Peter agreed.
“In any case, we should not forget that the killer felt forced to act, despite the fact that all of these suspicions were unprovable. This means that something in these accounts must have hit a sweet spot somehow, and that George’s way of thinking had at least gone in the right direction,” Connor said, thinking aloud.
Mira had gone to make fresh coffee and now held up the full pot. “Yes, please,” Peter said, pushing his cup towards her across the table. Mira filled it up and then put the coffee pot back into the coffee machine to keep it warm. As she sat back down at the table, she caught Connor’s gaze and felt a shiver running down her spine. He seemed merciless, like a predator that had found the trail of the prey he was now chasing after. She almost felt sorry for the killer — almost. “Apart from you, George names one more name,” she said and shook off the uncomfortable feeling. “Which is Russell Forbes.”
Peter and Connor looked at each other. It was Connor, who spoke first. “That is not entirely true,” he said slowly. Mira’s stomach tightened. “He also explicitly names your sister.”
“Suzanne had no reason whatsoever to kill dad,” she replied louder than she had wanted to. “And on top of that, where would she have gotten that weapon from?”
“She did admit that she had been fighting with your father on that same night ,” Connor responded in a surprisingly soft tone. “And it is not as hard as you might think to get a weapon. I know this through my own experience.” He pressed his lips into a thin line, as if he had already said too much.
Mira closed her eyes. When she starts taking drugs and acts like a whore, will you then still tell me: Just let her? It hadn’t been Suzanne who had fought with their father. It had been about Suzanne, but at this point her sister had already made the decision that she would run away, regardless of what her parents would say or do.
“What is it?” Connor looked straight at her with inquisitive eyes. “Are you remembering something?”
“It couldn’t have been Suzanne. On that night, she had planned to go to a party and I know for a fact that she had gone there. She had promised me that she would come and wish me goodnight when she got back.”
“I think that we should focus on Russell,” Peter suggested. “I also find it highly unlikely that a seventeen-year-old girl would shoot her dad, just because she wasn’t allowed to go to a party.” He looked at Connor with a serious gaze. “Or is there something that you are not telling me?”
Connor shook his head.
“Good.” It was obvious that his mistrust still wasn’t completely gone. “In that case, Russell is our main suspect. Unfortunately, our investigation has brought up nothing so far that connects him to the death of George Lacroix. No phone calls or emails and he has an alibi. At the time of Lacroix’s murder, Forbes was on the golf course. He has not only a whole group of game buddies who can confirm that, but there are also quite a few independent witnesses.” He bent over the laptop, typed something in, and then abruptly straightened up again. “I have forwarded that email to myself,” he declared and stretched. “I will discuss it with my team at our next meeting when we decide on the next steps. Other than that,” his gaze brushed Connor, “we shall see each other tomorrow night. Until then, nobody is to try anything single-handedly! Do I make myself clear?”
“I think you meant to say tonight,” Connor corrected him after a look at his watch. It was way past midnight.
“8 pm sharp,” Peter confirmed. “Mira, you will stay with Connor until then.”
There was no doubt that this was an order. “Yeah, but is that not suspicious? I mean, if I don’t drive back to Suzanne and look after her, like I promised I would? And what if my sister is the next target of this insane killer?”
“Mira,” Connor said, as he pulled her towards him. “Your sister is heavily medicated right now and she is the wife of our main suspect. She poses no danger to Russell. And also,” he spoke very slowly now, almost carefully, “Forbes wouldn’t gain anything from Suzanne’s death. Quite the opposite. Now, that your mother has died, you and your sister will inherit her shares in equal parts. He wouldn’t risk taking her out. That would jeopardize his position. Suzanne should not be in any danger right now.”
“Right now at least.” Peter agreed.
“But what will happen when he gets too drunk to think clearly and ends up killing her then?” Mira remembered the man who had lost his self-control and who had told her much more than he should have.
“Forbes literally only cares about one thing — money,” Connor said firmly. “His self-preservation drive is too big for him to jeopardize his current position of power. On top of that, we already know that he wouldn’t get his own hands dirty, and that he must have contracted someone to do the killing for him. How else would he have managed to have such an airtight and wonderful alibi?”
“Says the man, who provided a false alibi in court himself,” Mira countered with a determined look on her face. “So, the end justifies the means?”
“Sometimes it does,” Connor replied calmly. “Your brother-in-law is involved in this thing up to his eyeballs. So what — should I have gone to prison, even though I was innocent?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’m outta here,” Peter interrupted them both. “Don’t be too hard on this poor man, won’t you? As I told you before, Connor really is a good guy.”
Once Peter had left, they were silent for a while. There was so much to think about, that Mira’s head was spinning and she had no idea what to say at this point. Connor waited patiently, even though it didn’t seem to be easy for him. Sometime later, Mira got up, walked over to him, sat on his lap, and put her arms around his neck. “What have we got ourselves into?,” she whispered.
“Into total chaos,” Connor admitted. He pulled her closer as he wrapped his arms around her waist. “But I promise you, we will find a way out of this.”
“I hope so,” she said softly, before enjoying a quiet moment of peace. “You and Peter have a plan, right?”
His muscles tightened. “Yes.”
“Oh, come on, tell me already — this is like pulling teeth. How come the two of you don’t even have to discuss anything and you still seem to know what we have to do?” She waited anxiously for Connor’s reaction to her deliberate use of the word “we”.
“You will only take part on the sidelines,” he warned her and turned her around, so he could look at her. She could tell by the way he pressed his lips together, and how he frowned, that he wasn’t inclined to compromise on that one. She didn’t say anything and just looked at him defiantly. “We have done similar missions with the same pattern,” he went on to explain and moved, so she could sit on his lap more comfortably. “When an important person
is removed from the network, it will always create some waves. During our first operation together, we eliminated the boss of the biker gang, to see who would take the position after him. We knew that he had only been a placemat and that he could only be replaced following strict directions straight from the top. This also meant that the guys at the top would have to stick their heads out a bit. That enabled us to identify the next man higher up in the hierarchy. Once we got him,” he shrugged, “everything else was child’s play.”
Mira had no problem envisioning the young Connor back then — idealistic and honorable enough not to want to take part in any dirty drug deals. She could imagine that he had been more than happy to agree to work for the good guys. The question was how good someone could truly be, if they could literally eliminate another person, even if that person was a drug dealing biker boss.
“What did you do once you were released? Did you go back to work with Peter and his people?”
“Definitely not.” He snorted scornfully. “They might not have left me hanging, that I have to give them, but Peter was right with what he said about me.” His hands stroked her back tenderly.
“You mean that you were too emotionally involved?” Mira snuggled closer to him and felt his nod.
“Your mother was a wonderful woman,” Connor said. “She gave me so much without ever asking for anything back. Francesca really was just a very nice and good person. I thanked her by concocting a fake chance meeting and then I betrayed her — even though it had been for her own safety — but a lie remains a lie and she trusted me.” He snorted again. “Can you believe that? Back then, I was pretty darn inexperienced, had only just turned eighteen and I met this incredible woman who told me about her worries and the fear she constantly had for her husband and her two children.”
“Mom knew about dad’s illegal businesses?”
“She had her suspicions that something wasn’t quite right, but Jack refused to tell her anything. So, she began to snoop around — just like you are now, Mira. In that regard you are very much like your mom. And she was also just as stubborn as you.” Her chest tightened. The tears she hadn’t cried for these last few days now threatened to fall all at once. Her body shook with her sobbing and it didn’t want to end.
Connor just held her tight.
Once her tears had dried a little, he lifted her off his lap. “Come on,” he said and took her hand. “What you need now is a nice hot bath.” And ten minutes after that they both sat in soothing warm water. Mira sat between his legs and leaned back onto his chest, while he stroked her arms and shoulders gently with a soft sponge. “Just a few more days and it’ll all be over. It won’t be long now and then you will finally be able to start afresh.” He put the sponge aside and started to massage her breasts. She could feel his cock behind her rise and thicken. She felt how it came to life between her ass cheeks and how it pressed against her with desire. His hand slid down her belly to between legs and he started to stroke her clit.
Without saying a word, she stood up, took his hand and stepped out of the bath. Connor followed her. The water poured off his strong, well-trained body. Every single one of his muscles seemed modelled by hand. Nothing about his physique was exaggerated, not the arms, nor the muscles on his legs, and he was simply a beautiful and stunning specimen of a man. “What sports are you into?” she asked curiously, as her fingertips trailed along the taut lines on his six-pack.
“I like to climb, and I also like to do any type of endurance sports. Swimming and running,” he answered. She watched the gorgeous play of his chest muscles as he breathed. Despite his voice sounding pretty relaxed, his hungry eyes told an entirely different story.
“Endurance sport is excellent,” she said breathlessly. Then she took a step back and then another. He followed her.
Her back came to a halt at the bathroom door. Her fingers were searching for the door knob, which she then turned. Now, they were in the adjacent bedroom. Mira walked over to the bed without turning around to look and lay down on her back. Her want for him seemed to be pulsating between her legs. She was wet, and she wanted to feel Connor inside her immediately and as deep as possible. She felt how the mattress lowered beneath her as he kneeled on the bed. Her eyes were bathing in his glorious figure and she realized just how very sexy Connor actually was. His body was simply perfect.
She could have stared at him for hours — his broad shoulders, his muscular chest, and his flat and taut stomach. She had always thought that six-packs with clearly defined muscles only existed in women’s fantasies. But Connor’s stomach and his narrow hips were not only very real, they were incredibly stunning and masculine. She stretched out her hand towards him. He tensed his muscles underneath her tender touch and she loved to feel that sensation.
Then she turned over onto her belly and lifted her tight little ass up towards him. “I want you to come inside of me,” she said with a coarse voice. “I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to feel you inside me right now.”
He pushed a pillow underneath her midriff, grabbed her hips, and pulled her towards him, before pushing the swollen head of his penis between her wet labia. He lowered his body onto hers and grabbed her wrists. He didn’t say a word, which aroused Mira even more than his naked body had done.
Connor seemed to sense that right now her body did not want to be loved in a tender way, but that she instead wanted to him to ram into her hard and fast, until her body was completely exhausted. He entered her with one deep and merciless stroke.
****
Early next morning, before the sun came up, his phone buzzed. He reached out to it with his right hand. Mira lay in his arm and hovered somewhere between still sleeping and not wanting to wake up. “That was Peter,” he said and sat up straight. Mira woke up instantly and pulled the blanket up to her chest.
“What does he want?”
“He said that he has taken Russell into custody, because he has decided to move the case along a little quicker.”
“What?” She threw the blanket off her. “What is he thinking? I thought… I assumed that we would be working on this together.” She ran into the bathroom and jumped into her underwear, while watching Connor as he slipped into his jeans and a shirt. Those few hours in his arms always seemed to end in some kind of catastrophe, she thought. “I am not worried about Russell, but I have to go and see my sister right now,” she explained as she pulled hectically on the zipper of her skirt. He came to her and closed it for her.
“I will drive you,” he said.
“Peter is not planning to involve me in his investigation, is he?”
“I don’t think so,” Connor said reassuringly. “He is a professional and doesn’t like to work with amateurs.” He grabbed his car keys. “I am just as unhappy about this situation as you are. He shouldn’t have gone above our heads and taken matters into his own hands — he will hear a few fitting words from me about that. However, I do agree with him in a certain aspect, even if you don’t like it.” He started the engine as she was falling into her seat.
“I already know what you are going to say,” Mira mentioned.
“Oh really?” Connor looked at her quickly and his gaze was a weird combination of loving and angry at the same time.
“Yes, you will tell me that right now, the less I know, the less danger I will be in.”
“Perfect, then I won’t have to say it out loud anymore.”
Twenty minutes later, they stopped in front of Mira’s parents’ house. It was lit up like a Christmas tree, however there were no signs of police cars or even dark undercover vans, as Mira had envisioned when she had imagined Peter and his mysteriously secret organization.
“Do you know what his arrest now means?” Connor looked at her with slight worry in his eyes.
“Yeah, that I will have to take over the lead at Dumont Ltd much earlier than I thought I would,” she said. “Right now, Suzanne is not in the right frame of mind to deal with anything, so I will literally have to see what I can
do.” Connor nodded.
“But you will have to be careful. Promise me that you won’t do anything on your own. As soon as you find anything weird, you must call me. Immediately.”
“I promise,” Mira replied, when she realized how important this was to him.
“We will meet up today at lunch. I will come and get you at around one. And I will then put a wire on you,” he explained and didn’t even react to Mira’s surprise. “It is hard enough as it is to just let you go. Either I stay with you every second of the day and watch over you, or you carry a wire.” He smiled quickly. “There is one other option, but if I know you, it’s not something you would consider, and you might like it even less.”
“And that would be what?” She looked at him curiously.
“You sell your company,” Connor said as he closely watched her reaction.
“Under no circumstances is that an option. No money in the world would be enough for me to consider leaving Dumont Ltd to a stranger.”
“You could still stay there as the managing director,” Connor suggested.
“Don’t take it too far,” Mira warned him. “If I am wearing a wire, then that is for me, but the company is and will remain our inheritance in my family.”
He smiled and when the car came to a stop, he kissed her tenderly on her mouth before watching her until she closed the door behind her.
As Mira heard the engine howl, she realized that he had very cleverly manipulated her into giving in to his wishes. Connor had acted like he was giving her some kind of choice between two evils, even though he had already known that she would not sell the company under any circumstances. He really was the kind of man who always got what he wanted.
And now he wanted her.
Chapter 24
It was a very weird feeling to have to make decisions for others and to manage everything. Mira had no choice but to roll up her sleeves and get things organized, because if she didn’t, she would suffocate in the chaos around her. For the first time she was able to fully understand why Connor had adapted to this character trade and why it had become second nature to him: It felt good.
