Nauti Deceptions

by Leigh, Lora

  She licked her lips and his body clenched in longing. She took a deep breath, lifting her breasts against her T-shirt, and his hands ached to cup the firm mounds.

  She was young, precious. Could she understand the man he was, the man that had been years in the making?

  But she took his hand. Her fingers accepted his as they twined them through hers. Tiny, fragile, so fucking tender. Her hands were like silk and his dwarfed them.

  “A lot of people have been looking for you today,” she told him softly as he drew her into the house. “I assume John found you?”

  “John found me.” He nodded as he led her inside, then closed and locked the door behind them.

  He set the security alarm, just to be safe. He had no fear of his son walking in on them tonight; he’d made certain Shane was safe in Louisville and that Lucinda kept him there. It wasn’t the fear of his son seeing something he shouldn’t that rode Zeke now. It was the fear of being caught off guard before he could finish what he started.

  “Gene’s looking for you,” she told him then. “He was at the bar.”

  “I know.” And he didn’t want to talk about Gene, not yet. They’d been through hell together as boys, and Zeke thought the bond that had developed then would see them through their adult years. He had been more wrong than he could have ever imagined.

  “So you’re avoiding him?” she asked as he led her through the darkened house.

  He didn’t turn on the lights as he led her through the kitchen to the basement door. It was opened, the light below was still on, lighting the stairs as he led her down them.

  “I’m avoiding him,” he agreed.

  “Zeke.” She paused halfway down the steps, tugging at his hand.

  Zeke turned back to her. There was no fear in her eyes, but there was a hint of worry.

  “The answers I have are down here,” he told her, his jaw clenching at the truth of his life, a truth he may not be able to hide for much longer.

  His father had begun this legacy, and now Zeke was going to have to finish it. Finishing it would mean revealing the truth of the past, the truth of what he had nearly become and the boundaries crossed by men he had once respected.

  Dayle Mackay had started this decades ago. With his brother and a few military friends they had destroyed more lives than Zeke wanted to contemplate.

  Zeke had worked ten years to uncover the proof of what Dayle was, and in a few short months the Mackay cousins had managed to do what he had fought to do for a decade. But that was okay. He’d let them do it; he had known what they were doing, and he had stood back and watched it unfold as he had been ordered to do. Homeland Security had ripped through Somerset like a plague. Men he hadn’t known were involved had been uncovered as homeland terrorists working for a future destruction of the government as the nation knew it.

  He’d helped gather the evidence last year, and he’d kept his own secrets.

  Until now.

  “I was born in Somerset,” he told her as he led her into the basement.

  Boxes upon boxes of a life he hadn’t wanted to remember were opened now, their contents spilling along the floor and the tables he had used to stack them on.

  “I knew that.” Her fingers were stiff in his hold as she stared around the basement.

  “I left when I was fourteen. I was twenty-seven before I came back.”

  He glanced at her as she nodded slowly, her violet gaze locked on him.

  “I came back, because I thought surely, with Thad Mayes’s death, it couldn’t be as bad as it was when I was a kid. And if it was, I had a plan.”

  Bitterness welled inside him.

  “To become sheriff,” she stated.

  He nodded at that. “To become sheriff. To clean out the filth I knew lurked just below the surface of one of the most beautiful areas in the world. I’d make it safe, I thought.”

  “You have made it safe, Zeke,” she ventured softly.

  Zeke shook his head as he released her hand. “No, the Mackay cousins and DHS made it safe. I worked for ten years to gather the evidence I needed, and I was blocked at every turn. I couldn’t figure out how it was happening for years.”

  He moved away from her then. “It took an old man’s careless comment to remind me of a few things, and then it fell into place.”

  He turned back to her and breathed out harshly.

  “I’m not leaving town,” she said then. “I can see it in your face, Zeke. You’re going to ask me to leave again.”

  He shook his head to that. “It’s too late for any of us to escape this fucking mess.”

  He turned and faced the contents of the boxes he’d emptied.

  “Mom was like a pack rat.” He sighed. “She had so much junk she had to rent a storage unit for it. When she died and the house burned around her, I just packed all these boxes away after I retrieved them, thinking I’d go through them someday. See what she had kept. I didn’t expect she had everything I had ever searched for. Once I found some of it, it wasn’t that hard to know where to look for the rest of it.”

  There were pictures, there were journals he’d never known his mother kept. Dozens of journals, each day of her life from the day she married Thad Mayes recorded. She had never told him about the journals and he had never known she kept one. After the divorce she never took pictures, so Zeke hadn’t remembered the camera she had carried with her during her marriage to Thad Mayes.

  He’d forgotten most of his life as a child, because remembering always brought him back to the scent of blood in the air, and the betrayal of a father he had adored.

  “What were you looking for?” she asked.

  “Proof,” he answered, turning back to her. “Proof that Dayle Mackay, Nadine Grace, and several of Kentucky’s highest ranking political figures were involved in treason. I knew.” He shook his head as he moved to the pictures. “I’ve always known, I just couldn’t prove it.”

  “Dayle and Nadine are gone,” she whispered. “They’re dead, Zeke.”

  “They’re dead, but their legacy lives on.”

  “Zeke, you’re scaring me.”

  There was a hint of fear in her voice, in her gaze as he turned back to her, and he knew that the time for the truth was now or never.

  “Thirty years ago, there were three friends,” he told her. “They were as close as brothers.”

  He laid out the three individual pictures. Thad Mayes, Gene’s father, James Maynard, and Danny Jones.

  “These friends hunted together, they partied together, and like the Mackays did for a time, they fucked together.” His lips quirked bitterly at the little gasp that fell from her lips.

  “Then, along came a woman.” He pulled another picture free, that of Nadine Grace, then Nadine Mackay.

  There was a series of pictures then. Depraved, sexual acts the three men were involved in with the woman that had been photographed. He glanced at Rogue’s face and saw in her eyes the same disgust he felt each time he had looked at those pictures after finding them. He had no idea who had taken them, or why. But they were the reason his mother had died.

  “Then, Nadine Mackay set her eyes on another man.” He drew a picture of a young John Calvin Walker free.

  He looked like his son, John. This picture showed Cal Walker in front of the Bar, a bright smile on his face as he shook Danny Jones’s hand.

  “Now, he and Danny ‘Jonesy’ Jones were good friends. But I don’t think he knew what Jonesy was involved in with his other friends. Until this woman showed up.”

  Rogue’s mother, Brianna Evansworth.

  “Zeke,” she whispered. “Don’t destroy me.”

  He turned back to her and saw the fear and desperation in her face.

  Zeke shook his head. “Your father loved her the moment he saw her.” He turned back to the pictures. “Do you know why your father left Somerset?”

  She shook her head slowly, her eyes filling with tears.

  “Because Dayle Mackay wanted her,” he stated. “Dayle w
anted the Evansworth money that backed her, and he asked his three friends, Thad, James, and Jonesy, to help him.”

  It was all recorded in his mother’s journal. Years of sexual excess and photos that Dayle Mackay had sent to Thad Mayes when he’d tried to deny the other man anything that he wanted.

  “Jonesy refused. That’s why his leg is messed up. Not from that motorcycle wreck, though that didn’t help it. He was shot in the leg by his good friend Thad Mayes when it was learned he had warned Cal Walker that Dayle Mackay was going to try to take the woman he loved. Dayle thought a woman could be trained like a dog. Chain it up, starve it, abuse it, and it will come to heel.”

  Sickness welled inside him.

  “Cal and Brianna left for Boston,” he said. “Jonesy stayed, his friendship with Thad and James supposedly severed. But Somerset was his home. He eventually married and had a daughter. Thad divorced and his wife and son moved away, and James’s son, Gene, slowly separated himself from his father. They weren’t happy times for that little group, were they?” He glanced back at her.

  “Except for my father.”

  “Except for your father,” he agreed.

  “We flash to the present now,” he said. “Joe and Jaime. They were in love with a girl.” He turned to her, his chest heavy as she stared back at him. “A very young girl, and they were going to share her. And this is where things get dicey. This is where the sins of the father come back to haunt them.”

  He ran his hands over his face wearily. “This is where the sons have to pay the price for their fathers’ crimes maybe.”

  “You know the woman they were seeing?”

  He nodded. “I think I know who she was. And I know why the boys and their grandmother died.”

  He slid a picture free. Gene, when he was younger, a teenager. It came from a stack of pictures that showed his friend throughout his life, until Thad Mayes’s death actually. Because Thad believed in insurance. He had sent his ex-wife pictures for years.

  He fanned the pictures over the table as Rogue moved forward. She stared down at them as he did, that same black fury growing inside him as her hand lifted to his arm and her fingers tightened there.

  “Oh God,” she whispered when she came to the pictures that incriminated the man he had once thought of as a brother. The picture of Gene, his father, and Thad as they stood together with another couple, all dressed in camo gear, rifles held easily in their arms. The couple they stood with was Dayle Mackay and Nadine Grace.

  “They were a part of the Freedom League,” she whispered as she stared at the pictures. “Even Gene.”

  It wasn’t hard to miss. The FL was emblazoned on the shoulders of their camo gear, but even more incriminating were the bound bodies in front of them. The dead bodies of two state police officers that had gone missing ten years ago.

  It was an unsolved case, one that Zeke had been investigating himself for years. All this time, and the proof was under his nose.

  “Goddammit, all this time.” He swung away from her, the fury erupting inside him. “I had the proof all this time. That son of a bitch father of mine was sending Mom sealed envelopes of pictures and she never even opened them. Boxes of information, of proof. She kept them in boxes in a frigging rental unit in Los Angeles and never even opened them.”

  Because she had known what they were. He’d read parts of her journals, bits and pieces. No one would have suspected Thad Mayes of sending his ex-wife anything so incriminating. She hadn’t been a part of the League—it was the reason for their divorce—but still, she had kept his secrets, kept his evidence against himself and the men he had banded together with.

  Just in case, she had written in her journal. He had asked her to take anything he sent her and place it, unopened, in a safe place. He’d collect it later, he had promised. He had never collected it.

  A few months before her death she had written in that last journal that Thad was going to make life easier for her. Zeke was grown and on his own, and it was time she enjoyed her life. She’d threatened to turn the pictures over to the authorities. Pictures she had taken while she had been with him, pictures of the men that had formed the Freedom League. She’d had no idea the proof she had actually held in that damned rental unit. Proof far more incriminating than what she’d had herself.

  She’d stored that journal away, the last one she had written in before she was killed. A year later, Thad Mayes had died in another inferno that had burned his body and any evidence he may have kept himself. That had been mere months after the picture of the two dead state police officers had been taken.

  “Joe and Jaime were seeing Gene’s youngest daughter, Cammi,” Rogue said faintly. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  Zeke felt as though the tension was going to break him apart. His muscles, his bones, were tight with the fury racing through him.

  “She had to have been the girl they were seeing. Joe and Jaime knew Gene was a part of the Freedom League,” he said harshly. “They knew, and they didn’t say anything because of Cammi. Because they were in love with her. But someone overheard a conversation they had. One where Jaime stated that Gene was a part of what happened last year with the Mackays. That he’d use it against her father if he caused them too much trouble. They died because of what they knew, and that’s why Callie Walker died as well. Because Gene had to keep his part in this a secret.” His fists clenched at his side. “Because he was still a part of the League.”

  “Do you have proof?”

  Zeke shook his head. “All I have is proof that he was part of the League, and the deaths of those officers.”

  “What are you going to do, Zeke?” she asked. “Gene is at the bar looking for you. He said he’d been trying to contact you all day. He has to be suspicious.”

  “I’ve faxed the pictures to Agent Cranston,” he told her as he turned to her. “I want you to stay here, Rogue, where you’ll be safe. No one will know you’re here. The bar could be torched with you in it. They don’t care to kill innocent bystanders. I’m meeting the Mackay cousins and Agent Cranston in town in an hour. We’ll take care of this tonight. All of it.”

  He’d been busy. The moment Teddy Winfred’s information had clicked in his brain Zeke had come home to search for the pictures he had himself from his youth. In searching for them, he’d found the boxes of sealed, mailed envelopes his mother had kept. The information in her journals had shocked him, enraged him. It had taken most of the day to find everything, and there were still more to go through. But he had what he needed.

  “What about Cammi?” she asked. “She’s not part of this, Zeke.”

  He stared at her in surprise. Cammi had never been kind to Rogue. She had sneered at her, insulted her countless times over the years, but still Rogue was thinking of her. And, as Rogue stated, Cammi was innocent of everything but wanting the wrong men. He hoped.

  “We’ll watch out for Cammi,” he promised her. “I want your promise that you’ll stay here, keep your phone off, stay out of contact.”

  He held her gaze, willing, determined that she would do exactly as he wanted her to do. He couldn’t give her promises yet, he couldn’t let himself believe in promises yet, not until this was finished.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” She asked the question he hoped she wouldn’t. “How are you involved in this, Zeke?”

  He leaned against the old desk, crossed his arms over his chest, and watched her carefully.

  “Look at those pictures again,” he told her softly. “The earlier ones, Rogue. I was fourteen before Mom divorced that bastard. The League is generational, baby. I was a part of it before we went to Los Angeles. Before I even understood what it meant, I was there. I hunted with them, I listened to their plans, and I let myself be convinced I was right, they were right. This is why I came back, to see it finished. The Mackays cut off the head of the organization, but the body’s still alive. It can reform if it’s not finished. This will finish it. My mother and my wife were killed as a wa
rning. Gene has to know how close I am to revealing his part in this. I can’t risk you. I’d die if I lost you.”

  “There’s more.” She shook her head, those flaming curls whispering around her shoulders and down her back as she stared back at him from the most beautiful eyes in the world.

  He’d tried to hide from what he felt for her. From the time he first saw her, until now. As though a veil lifted from his soul, Zeke saw what he didn’t want to see. Emotions fueled by needs. The knowledge that this one woman had been created for him. She could be his greatest strength or his greatest weakness in the hands of his enemies.

  “You’ve played everyone,” she finally said softly. “You’ve suspected all this, all along. Didn’t you?”

  He barely managed to hide his surprise.

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.” He forced himself away from the table, paced to the other side of the room, then turned back to her.

  “You suspected Gene was a part of the League and that Joe and Jaime had somehow been killed because of the group.”

  She hadn’t moved, but her gaze followed him, thoughtful, partially angry.

  “What part did I play in this, Zeke?” she asked him as she waved her hand toward the scattered papers and pictures. “How did sleeping with me help you to get where you were trying to go?”

  His jaw clenched. Hell, he was hoping she wouldn’t see that, because while that’s what it may have begun as, it wasn’t finishing that way.

  “They were watching me,” he finally said softly. “They were focused on my investigation of Joe and Jaime’s death. They weren’t watching DHS or the Mackay boys. Cranston was never suspended from duty, officially. The Mackays were never off the case. Gene’s been watching you for years, simply because you were Calvin’s daughter and because Jonesy tried to protect you. He wondered what you knew, what Jonesy knew. I let them focus on that while the others did their job.”