“Nor is it yours,” he growled.
“It’s mine,” Hank said helpfully, and dragged a chair from the kitchen to place beside Hunter. He patted the seat. “Here you go, Mr. Fortune. Have a seat.”
His nostrils flaring in barely controlled fury, Hunter gave his slacks a hitch at the knee, then sank down, his spine ramrod straight. He waited silently, pointedly, while Isabelle and Link moved to sit on the sofa, and Hank dropped down on the sofa’s arm.
“So,” Hank said cheerfully, slapping his hands down on his knees as he glanced around the room at everyone. “Can I offer anyone anything to drink?”
Link moaned and dropped his forehead onto his palms and his elbows onto his knees.
“No, thank you,” Isabelle said politely, then glanced at her father. “Dad?”
“No,” he barked, then squirmed in his chair when she pursed her lips at him in disapproval. He folded his arms across his chest, his face reddening, but muttered the appropriate niceties under his breath.
“Well!” Hank said, giving his knees another slap. “If no one’s thirsty, I guess that leaves us with nothing to do but discuss what we came inside to talk about.”
Six
“Brad killed Mike Dodd.”
At Isabelle’s blunt pronouncement, Link groaned against his hands, while her father leaped up from his chair. Fortune’s chest puffed to the point where he looked as if he might burst his shirt’s buttons at any minute, or float to the ceiling like a helium-filled balloon.
“Isabelle!” he roared. “What has come over you?”
She met his gaze defiantly. “It’s true. Brad killed Mike Dodd.”
“It’s him,” Hunter accused, pointing a finger at Link again. “He’s filled your head with this nonsense to hide his own guilt.”
Before Link had a chance to respond, to share the evidence he’d gathered that pointed to Brad’s guilt, Isabelle snapped, “Link is guilty of nothing but trying to see justice served. I know Brad’s guilty because I overheard two men talking just before the wedding, and they alluded to Brad’s part in Mike’s death.”
“Who?” her father demanded to know. “Name them and I’ll drag them before the grand jury myself.”
Isabelle dropped her gaze and plucked at the skirt of her dress. “I don’t know,” she murmured.
Hunter’s expression turned smug. “Just as I thought. You’re trying to protect him, aren’t you?” He glanced around the small room, the solitary bedroom and unmade bed beyond the single interior door in plain view, then narrowed his eyes on the top of Link’s bowed head. “And just exactly what has been going on in this cabin while the two of you have been hiding out here?”
Link jerked up his head at the insinuation to glare at Hunter, then turned to level a look on Hank. Hank received the silent message and rose. “Isabelle,” he said, offering her his hand. “Why don’t you and I take a little walk?”
“B-but—” she stammered. Hank caught her hand and pulled her to her feet.
“Go,” Link ordered under his breath when she continued to hesitate. “I can handle this.”
With a last worried look at Link, then a quelling look at her father, Isabelle allowed Hank to lead her from the cabin.
Once they were gone, Link rose to glare down at Fortune. “I don’t care what you think about me,” he said tersely, “or what you think you know about me, but my main concern throughout all of this has been Isabelle’s safety and well-being.”
“As has been mine,” her father replied furiously.
“Fine,” Link snapped. “Then we don’t have a problem.”
“Oh, but we do. Starting with the lies about Brad you’ve filled Isabelle’s head with.”
“They aren’t lies!” Link shouted, then slapped a hand against the back of his neck and turned away, kneading at the tension there. “What Isabelle told you is the truth,” he said, struggling for calm as he began to pace. “Just before the wedding was scheduled to begin, she overheard two men talking in the vestibule of the church. What they said convinced her that Brad murdered Mike Dodd. She was frightened. Unsure what to do. So she ran.”
“She could have come to me with her concerns.”
Link whirled, his face red with rage. “There wasn’t time, dammit! There were only minutes before the wedding was to begin. She panicked and she ran. And I don’t blame her,” he added furiously. “She was running for her life.”
Hunter’s face paled at the desperate image Link painted for him and sank weakly down to the chair. “I would have protected her. I would never let anyone harm her again.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Link asked, taking a step closer. “You expected her to marry Brad Rowan. Her words, not mine,” he added when Hunter lifted his head to glare at him. “She didn’t love Brad. She only agreed to marry him to please you. All of you. To give her family that piece of land. To repay you for all you’ve sacrificed for her.”
“No,” Hunter said, wagging his head in denial. “Isabelle’s happiness, her well-being, is much more important to me, us, than any piece of land.”
“Obviously, she didn’t think so, because she was willing to sacrifice both for a piece of real estate.”
Hunter closed his hands over his knees and gripped them, rocking back and forth as he stared unseeing at the sofa where his daughter had sat only moments before. “She doesn’t understand the ways of the world,” he said, suddenly looking old, beaten. “We’ve protected her. Shielded her from unpleasantries.”
“Smothered her,” Link muttered.
Hunter snapped up his head. “Because of what happened to her,” he said, his voice thick with accusation. “The abduction,” he added, rising. “Which you know the details of all too well, don’t you?”
The allegation hit its mark, a direct strike to Link’s heart, his very soul, making him collapse inward, as if he’d taken a slug from a .38 in the chest. “Yes,” he moaned, and turned away. “But I had nothing to do with it.”
“But you were privy to it. You knew your stepbrother had taken her. You had to have known. You lived in the same house with him.”
Link straightened and inhaled deeply, trying to ease the pain in his chest. In his heart. Seeing again the news footage of Isabelle’s face as she’d been carried from the cabin by the SWAT team. “How did you find out?” he whispered.
“Public records, for the most part,” Fortune told him. “Everybody’s included in them, whether they are privy to the fact, or not. When you arrested Riley, I was furious. I knew you had the wrong man, yet you seemed determined to blame my son for a crime he didn’t commit. I wanted to find out everything I could about you. Prove your ineptness, destroy your credibility so that the authorities would be forced to release Riley. But then you released him, before my own investigation of you was complete.
“My interest in you should have waned then,” he continued, “but it didn’t. It only increased. Why would you arrest Riley, then work diligently to prove his innocence? I asked myself this same question over and over again, without finding an acceptable answer.” He shook his head, as if even now he didn’t understand Link’s actions.
“I studied every piece of information about you that I could get my hands on,” he said, continuing. “From your birth records on. Nothing. I could find nothing to fault you with. A man who had lived an impoverished life, dragged around by a mother who married again and again, each time seemingly more foolishly. A man who graduated from high school with exemplary grades, in spite of never remaining in the same school system for more than six months. A man who went on to college where he worked his way through to a degree in criminal justice over a period of seven years.”
He shook his head again as he continued to study Link. “I could find nothing to fault you with,” he repeated. “Until I happened to notice your mother’s last name. The name she carried at the time of Isabelle’s abduction.”
“Razley,” Link muttered bitterly.
“Yes, Razley,” Fortune confirmed. “I knew then
that you, more than likely, were aware of Isabelle’s abduction. Suspected that you might even have been involved.”
“Yes, I knew,” Link murmured, fighting back the guilt that the admission, the association, drew. “But I wasn’t involved. And I didn’t know where they held her.”
“Then why did you remain silent? Why didn’t you tell the police what you knew?”
Link whirled, his face red, his body stiff with rage. “I couldn’t come forward until I knew where they held her. The media were all over the place. Someone in the department could have leaked them the story, revealing the kidnappers’ identity. If they had, my stepbrother Joe and his accomplice would have killed her. I know they would.”
Fortune’s eyes sharpened, then narrowed suspiciously. “You made the call, didn’t you? You were the one who told the police where to find her.”
Link dug his fingers through his hair. “Yes,” he moaned, the memory, the fear of what Joe would do to her, might already have done to her, filling him again.
“But you refused to reveal your name, to collect the reward we offered.”
Link dropped his hands and turned away with an angry snarl. “I didn’t want your money.”
“Then what did you want? What did you expect to gain by exposing your stepbrother’s guilt and that of his friend when you made that call?”
“Nothing.” Link felt the emotion swelling in his chest, burning in his throat. He tipped his head back and gulped it back. “I just wanted them to let her go. She was just a little girl. Innocent. I wanted her home. With her family. Where she belonged.”
“They would have killed her. They planned to, you know.”
Link groaned, squeezing his eyes shut against the reality of that, wishing that Fortune would stop pounding him with the reminders, with all the fears he’d lived with those three days. “I knew what they were capable of.”
“They’d hurt you before, hadn’t they? That’s what earned you the scars on your face. Joe Razley was mean to the bone and enjoyed abusing you. I found the emergency room records where you were treated for a laceration on your face. He did that to you, yet you refused to name him for fear the police would arrest him.”
Link could only nod, unable to push a sound past the emotion that still clotted in his throat, remembering his fear for his mother, fear of what Joe or his old man would do to Link’s mother if Link had dared squeal on his stepbrother. They had both lived in fear of the Razley men since his mother’s marriage to Joe, Sr. when Link was nine years old.
“And knowing that, knowing that if you stepped forward and exposed them, you were endangering your own life, you made that call, informing the police of Isabelle’s whereabouts.”
Link clenched his teeth. “Yes,” he ground out. “I knew what they were capable of. What they would do to her. Was haunted by what they might have already done.”
He felt a hand close over his shoulder, the dig of fingers squeezing deep. A shudder quaked through him, but he stiffened his spine, refusing to give into the emotion.
“And you’ll keep her safe now,” Hunter said quietly. “I’m entrusting her care to you. Make damn sure that you earn that trust.”
Isabelle stood on the dirt road and watched the Jeep drive away. She wasn’t sure what had happened after she and Hank had left the cabin, what all had transpired between her father and Link. She only knew that when she and Hank had returned from their walk, her father had been waiting by the Jeep and Link was nowhere in sight. Her father had given Isabelle a tight hug, waved Hank behind the wheel, then climbed inside. They’d driven away without her father saying a word to her.
She glanced toward the cabin, her stomach knotted in dread, then raced toward the porch and up the steps.
“Link?” she called as she pulled open the door and stepped inside. She stopped, her heart seeming to stop, too, when she saw him standing in the kitchen, his hands braced on the edge of the sink, staring out the window. She gulped a breath at the rigidness of his spine, the hard set of his jaw, then crossed to him and placed a hand on his back. Leaning around him to peer up at him, she said, “Link? Are you okay?”
She felt a shudder move through him before he turned. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. She could see that. Something had changed. “What happened?” she asked, the dread winding tighter at the lack of emotion on his face, in his eyes. “What did my father say to you?”
“We just cleared the air a bit, that’s all.” He stepped around her and moved into the main room. “We’ve come up with a plan,” he said, and picked up the chair Hank had dragged into the room for her father to sit on. He returned it to the kitchen, pushed it beneath the table, then turned away again, avoiding her gaze.
“Plan?” she repeated, staring at him. “What plan?”
“The dedication is tomorrow. The one for the Children’s Hospital your family built.”
She frantically searched her mind, trying to see the association. “What does that have to do with you? Us?”
“We’re going.”
Her heart slammed hard against her ribs at the thought of returning to Pueblo, of having to face all those people again. Specifically Brad. “We are?”
“Yes. And you’re going to work the crowd,” he told her. “I’ll stick by your side,” he added, as if sensing her fear. “But your job is to listen to voices. See if you can pick up on those of the two men you overheard talking in the sanctuary. Once you nail them, all you have to do is give me a nod, and I’ll take it from there.”
She gulped. Swallowed hard. “What about Brad? Will he be there?”
He turned to peer at her, his eyes veiled, hiding from her whatever emotion might have been there. “Naturally. He was one of the suppliers your father’s company used for materials. Everyone associated with the building of the hospital will be present for the dedication.”
Panic winged through her at the thought of seeing Brad again. “But what will I say to him? Do?”
He looked at her, yet through her, never really meeting her gaze. She felt nothing, not even a smidgen of warmth, of compassion from him.
“Nothing,” he said, and turned for the bedroom. “You don’t have to say or do anything. Ignore him, if you want. You don’t owe him anything. Not even an explanation, if you choose not to offer him one.”
Isabelle stared after Link, unable to speak, move. What had happened? she asked herself as her knees grew weak. What had her father said to Link that had filled him with this cool disregard for her? What had he done that had turned Link into a total stranger to her?
Isabelle lay in bed, waiting for Link to finish with his shower, her nerves tuned to every sound beyond the closed door. The groan of the pipes when he turned on the water. The wet splat of his bare feet when he stepped into the tub and beneath the spray. The scrape of the metal rings as he jerked the shower curtain along the rod, closing it around him. The gurgle of soapy water emptying down the drain as he rinsed the lather from his body.
She held her breath when the water shut off. Released it slowly as she listened to his feet slap wetly against the floor. She closed her eyes, imagining him drying off…and prayed that when he climbed into bed with her, he would take her in his arms, hold her, make love to her. Then she’d know that everything was all right. That nothing had changed between them.
She heard the door squeak open on its hinges, but kept her eyes closed, not wanting him to see the fear there. She listened to the pad of his bare feet as he passed by the bed.
Tears burned beneath her closed lids as his footsteps continued, carrying him into the main room. She listened to the squeak of springs as he sat down on the sofa. The click of the light switch, signifying that he was sleeping on the sofa and not with her. Drawing in a ragged breath, she buried her face against the pillow.
Oh, God, she moaned silently, feeling her heart breaking. What had she done? What had her father done or said that had changed things? She’d been so sure of Link’s feelings for her, hers for
him. They’d been so happy.
What had happened to change all of that?
After several hours of tossing and turning, Isabelle rolled from the bed and to her feet, her chest heaving with anger, her hands fisted at her sides, ready to do battle. She wasn’t going to just sit back and let things happen to her any longer, she told herself. Allow people to manipulate her emotions, her actions, her life. She had a right to know what her father had said to Link. And he’d said something, threatened Link in some way, she was sure. There was no other explanation for the sudden change in Link’s attitude toward her.
Before her father’s arrival, everything had been fine between them. More than fine, she corrected herself, marching for the door. Marvelous. Extraordinary. Off the charts, hedonistically, satisfyingly perfect.
She strode straight for the sofa and stopped, folding her arms beneath her breasts as she glared down at Link’s sleeping form. Furious that he could sleep, when she was drowning in uncertainty, miserable because she didn’t know what had gone wrong, she lifted a foot and gave his leg a sound kick.
He jackknifed to a sitting position and twisted around, one arm reared back, hand fisted, ready to deliver a punch.
“Hit me,” she said, squaring her shoulders, preparing for it. “Go ahead and hit me. At least it would be a sign that you feel something for me, if only anger.”
He shook his head as if to clear it, focused on her, then slowly swung his legs over the side of the sofa and dropped his face onto his hands, moaning. “What are you doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep. And it makes me really angry to know that you could.”
He dragged his hands down his face and swung his legs back up on the sofa, pulling the sheet back over himself. “Go back to bed,” he grumbled. “We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”
Furious that he thought he could tell her what to do, that he could wave her off to bed as if she were a disobedient child, she lifted her foot and kicked him again.
Groom 0f Fortune (Fortune's Children: The Grooms Book 5) Page 10
