Legal Action - Box Set (43 page)

              Her father had given her the key to the grand old house and a cashier’s check for a stupefying amount of money. The key and the check were from the law firm that had mishandled her grandmother’s estate. JP and Amanda met them at the Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter the night before, and Charlotte had gotten falling down drunk at the Old Absinthe House. Charlotte recounted every detail of her trip to the Crescent City with her mother years before. She had cried several times and Amanda had drunkenly cried with her, until their husbands finally put them both to bed and went back to the bar.

              It was the first week in April and the hour long drive was straight out of a postcard for the Old South. Dogwood trees were in riotous bloom, along with magnolias, camellias, gardenias and all manner of flowering vines. Confederate jasmine, wisteria, Lady Banks roses, morning glories and trumpet vines tangled in trees and the scent was mixed with the mysterious smell of the swamps and bayous. Charlotte had insisted on a convertible from the rental car agency, and Finn drove while she pointed out every type of native vegetation and made them all inhale the heady aroma of her childhood.

              The car’s tires crunched on the long gravel driveway, and they looked up with wonder at the willow trees arching overhead. The old trees were so dense they blocked out the sky, and so heavy with Spanish moss, Finn and JP could reach up and grab handfuls. When the McCall house came into view, Charlotte began to cry again.

              Everything was just as she remembered from the short time she’d spent there as a thirteen year old. The historic society had maintained every pristine inch of the house, and it looked as if her smartly dressed and bejeweled grandmother might walk right up at any minute and slap Charlotte in the face. 

              “Old bitch, fucking cold-hearted, uptight asshole, close-minded whore…” Charlotte shouted, as she tried to stop her hand from shaking and get the key in the lock.

              “Here you go my love, let me do that and you shout to the heavens about the cock-sucking witch,” Finn said calmly, taking the key from her and holding her against him with one arm as he opened the door.

              She laughed then, and Amanda laughed with her, and then JP, and finally Finn. Charlotte stumbled into the living room and lay across the sofa she was laughing so hard, and the others followed and fell into chairs and clutched their sides until the insanity burned itself out.

              “I need a drink!” JP said in the quiet moments that followed their delirious laughter, “I’m going to find a liquor store, anybody want anything?”

              “You’re a fucking drunk, John Paul,” Charlotte shouted as he walked toward the door.

              “I know, what can I get for you?” he asked, looking back at the little group.

              “Vodka, tonic, and lime,” Charlotte and Amanda said at the same time.

              “So what are you going do with this old place, I mean, it’s gorgeous but its huge and in the middle of nowhere,” Amanda asked, when JP had returned from the liquor store and they walked down to the Gulf, drinks in hand.

              “Her father would like for us to live here, he’s moving back to New Orleans at the end of the year and he doesn’t want to be away from Atticus,” Finn said.

              “Oh my God! This sand is like powder, it feels amazing,” Amanda said. “Would you really leave England?”

              “Oh, I don’t know about that, being here does make me miss living in the states. Then I picture Atti in the little English schoolboy uniform someday, you know, speaking with an irresistible British accent like his daddy,” Charlotte said as they walked along on the soft sand with the warm Gulf washing over their feet.

              “I’m pretty sure the kid will pick up the accent from Shakespeare over there,” JP said, nodding toward Finn. “Amanda and I are settled into a great little house in La Jolla, we think you should come home. Come back to San Diego, I’ve already started my own law firm representing Veterans with disability claims. We always said that’s what we’d do, Finn, when we quit the covert ops shit, come on, we’ll be partners.”

              “We’ll talk,” Finn said, “Charlotte and I will talk it over, right my love?”

              “What about your mother?” Charlotte asked, “Would she want to move back here? Atticus couldn’t live without her.”

              “I’m certain she’d love to be near my sisters again,” Finn said. “Okay, back to the McCall house, we were tossing around the idea of a bed and breakfast. I think it’s a good idea, we can hire someone to run it and we can come visit in the summers, and let Atticus dig his toes into southern soil.”

              “A bed and breakfast and a great venue for weddings and special events!” Amanda yelled, stopping dead in her tracks and grabbing hold of Charlotte. “Weddings and baby showers and debutante bullshit, and I know just who can have their wedding here!”

              They went into Pass Christian and bought sheets and towels at Bed Bath and Beyond, then stopped for dinner at the Half Shell Oyster Bar. They ate and drank and Amanda filled them in on Bly’s love life.

              She said the couple was blissfully happy, Bly had proposed when they stopped off in Paris to see Evangeline, before returning to California. Maddie was living with Bly now, and she and her mother had the entire wedding planned except for the location. They were looking for the perfect spot somewhere between northern Florida and southern California, and the McCall house in Pass Christian was it! By the way, she said, West was no longer working for her brother, Billy Kipling had taken over his job when West resigned. West was living in Paris with her mother and they were obviously doing the wild thing twenty-four-seven. Amanda rolled her eyes and said Bly had been livid over the whole thing and he’d acted like a total asshole at first.

              “At first?” Finn asked.

              “Don’t go into it, Amanda,” JP said, as they left the oyster bar and started back to the house.

              “So Bly has issues with Evangeline sleeping with his former bodyguard, that’s fairly archaic,” Charlotte said.

              “I know,” Amanda said, “but Mother said he finally came around because he and West had a big heart to heart. West basically admitted that he’s been desperately in love with our Mother for years and Alex should certainly understand what that’s like… oh shit.”

*

              Finn and Charlotte put sheets on an antique canopy bed in one of the guestrooms that faced the Gulf. They’d opened the doors to let the salt-breeze in and the ghosts out. Charlotte handed a bag of new linens to JP and Amanda and told them to pick any room they wanted, but she was not going to sleep with the past. She wouldn’t sleep in her grandmother’s bed or Sally’s room or the room filled with the sports trophies and memorabilia of the boy who’d died at fourteen.

              When they were snug in the canopy bed, listening to the waves on the beach below the back verandah, Finn pulled her to him and looked into her eyes. 

              “I can live with him loving you, but just barely,” he said.

“My mother’s family was Catholic,” Charlotte said softly, after she kissed his ravishing mouth and settled against his smoothly muscled shoulder. “She raised me to believe in the power of prayer and the truths in the bible and to make my own decisions about Adam and Eve and the serpent and stories such as that. I used to need to have sex when I was mad and the adrenalin was pumping, I needed sex as a release. With you I want to have sex in any mood, happy, sad, mad, whatever. I
want
sex and I need it, too, and it completes me because you’re my love as well as my lover. I think God really did take a rib from Adam to make Eve, and when the right woman and the right man find each other, it’s like finding their missing part. I’m going about this in a round about way, but I want you to know that the first time you touched me, that must have been how it was for the first man and woman. That first shock of human contact, the discovery of pure joy, and I think when it’s right, the thrill doesn’t ever go away.”

“My love my love,” he whispered, his hand smoothing her hair as she lay against him, and they could feel each other smiling in the dark as their bodies found just where they belonged.

CHAPTER SEVEN

              Bly’s sprawling mansion was coming to life, Maddie had always wanted to own a dog but traveling for work had kept her from it. She looked at every website that Bly showed her, urging her to pick a Labrador or Golden Retriever or even a miniature dachshund. When the call finally came from the Border Collie rescue shelter, she was ecstatic, and she could barely sit still as they drove to pick up the pair of abandoned dogs. They drove the Range Rover that Bly had given Maddie when she moved in with him, and as they neared the rescue shelter, she was almost as excited as if she was going to have a baby.

It worried her, that she hadn’t become pregnant. They both wanted children, and although their wedding wasn’t until June and it was only April, they weren’t using any form of birth control. They were never careful, and they hadn’t been apart since New Year’s Eve.

              Maddie shook the silent fear from her mind, it had only been a few months after all, and she concentrated on the lively dogs that were waiting for them. Curly and Mo were good names they decided, even though the dog’s hair was sleek black and white. Curly was a female and a little older than Mo, and Maddie thought they would have had adorable puppies one day, but it was policy at animal rescue that they were spayed and neutered.

              Bly felt sorry for them at first, that someone had just gotten tired of the dogs and put them up for adoption. His mother had Standard Poodles for years and even when she didn’t have time for him or Amanda, she’d been devoted to Fifi and Gigi and all the other dogs who followed.

After the dogs settled into their new home, Bly and Maddie took them walking on the beach below the mansion every day. They threw tennis balls and Frisbees for the dogs to fetch, and they were incredibly smart and loving. Bly found himself looking forward to their enthusiastic greeting whenever he walked through the door. It always made him smile, whether he’d stepped outside for ten minutes or had been gone all day, they were just as happy to see him.

              Maddie’s mother became more and more of a fixture, and he liked her, liked the sound of the two women talking nonstop. Their voices echoed through the multitude of rooms in the house and he realized how empty it had been for too long. They were planning the wedding and it would be an over-the-top affair from the sound of things. He didn’t really care one way or the other, as long as his beautiful Maddie was pleased.

              She crawled in their bed late one night, still damp from the shower and she whispered against his ear, asking if he was happy.

              He held her down on the bed as he kissed her eager mouth, then her neck then her hard, pale nipples. He released her hands and held her small waist as his tongue explored the hot folds of her sex and she cried out and tangled her hands in his hair. He used his tongue and his fingers relentlessly until she’d cum three times and she begged to have his cock in her. Her hands reached for him and guided him and he moved slowly, and then harder and deeper as he poured himself into her. He lay on his side afterward and pulled her against him, his cock wet against the smooth cheeks of her ass, and they slept.

*

              Billy Kipling was glad for the job as Alexander Bly’s body guard, he liked California and he could fly to Kansas once a month to see his baby daughter. Bly said West was nearing fifty and he’d been meaning to retire. Billy knew it was much more than that, he’d known West for ten years and in those years, West had only ever mentioned one woman. He even carried an old photograph of her in his wallet, and one night when he was drinking he’d shown it to Billy. It was Evangeline Bly, tall and aloof and beautiful, but also cold and untouchable, it seemed to Billy. What was it about that kind of woman that made men lose themselves so completely, he wondered?

              Billy thought Charlotte was, without a doubt, over-the-top beautiful, and it was clear to him on the jet in Taiwan, that Bly had it bad for her. What he didn’t understand was, why the fuck Bly wasn’t panting after his own sexier than fuck fiancé like a dog with two dicks. Bly treated her well, and it was obvious that he loved her in some way, but Billy thought that if she was his fiancé, he’d do more than just be nice to her. He was seriously hot for Maddie Newland, he had been since the first moment he saw her. She had that ‘girl next door’ innocent face and a body that could stop a clock. Just thinking about her made his dick so hard he had to masturbate in one of the many bathrooms in Bly’s mansion at least once every day. He dreamed about Maddie, her face and her tantalizing curves, and he knew that eventually the new Mrs. Bly would come to him to get what she needed.

“Do you ever hear from Charlotte?” Billy asked Bly one day, when Maddie and her mother had gone shopping. Bly was putting the leashes on the dogs to take them for a walk, and Billy always went along now that he worked for Bly.

              “No, why do you ask?”

              “I thought you two were friends or maybe related, you know, the way you helped find her husband, and then she was so determined to find you alive,” Billy said, and he wished he hadn’t said anything because of the dark look on Bly’s face. “Sorry I brought it up, Mr. Bly.”

              “Call me Alex,” Bly said, “tell me about how it was, how it all happened when I was missing.”

              So Billy told him how Finn had contacted him, and that Charlotte wouldn’t leave it to Billy to find Bly by himself. Then Maddie had come up with the idea about the dress, and it led them to the house on the river. That he and Charlotte saw Bly through a window and before he could stop her, Charlotte had burst in the house with her gun. That she chased the woman, Natalie, out onto the ice and Natalie said she would kill Charlotte and watch her little boy suffer for the rest of his life. Then Charlotte shot her gun into the ice around Natalie’s feet so that both women went into the freezing water.