Men-of-Action-Seres-04 -Saints and Sinners (18 page)

She smiled. “I better not or I am so going to be pissed at you forever.”

He laughed. “Don’t be like that, darlin’. I’d rather you love me forever.”

She giggled. “Why am I this happy with you? I mean you…” Saints and Sinners 166

“Shot you…” he finished her sentence.

“Hey, that’s right, you did. You shot me.” If that hadn’t been what she was about to say then he didn’t know what her sentence would have been. He was sorry now that he’d brought up Central America again.

“You shot her?” Thomas asked incredulously.

“He did,” she confirmed. “I should be angry with you still.”

“But you’re not?” He asked cautiously, as if he needed to tread lightly.

“What did you shoot her for?”

“I was saving her life,” Sully defended himself.

“By shooting her? Jeeze, Sully. Remind me never to let you save my life.”

Alaina laughed. “Well, in his defense, the guy did have a knife to my throat.”

“See.”

“But that doesn’t excuse your shooting me,” she confirmed. “You could have just shot him.”

“I did shoot him.”

“You shot me first!”

He shook his head. “Would you have preferred if I had shot you second?”

“I would have preferred if you hadn’t shot me at all.” She wrapped her arms around him again. “Besides, that wasn’t what I was going to say.”

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“Then what were you going to say?” He wanted to know her words, her thoughts, her heart, everything. She smiled, almost deviously as if she just might make him work hard for it, but then her smile turned soft, warm, inviting.

“I was going to say that you and your family made me happier than I’ve been in a long time.”

He pulled her in close once more, wrapping his arms around her and enveloping her in his warmth. “I don’t want to leave you tomorrow, Alaina. Tomorrow I might find out something, you’re not ready to handle.”

She exhaled slowly. ““We must not be afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead us.”

“Thomas Jefferson.”

“Jefferson had it right. We don’t get to pick and choose our truths.

You must follow it, even if it leads you some place that ends up hurting me.” She pulled back and looked into his eyes, tears shimmering, threatening to escape her control. “I just need to know that you’ll be there with me if it does.”

“I’ll be there, right beside you.”

Alaina looked forward to the night time hours now. She barely had the nightmares she had begin to have again, not the ones about her captivity, but the ones about the death of her father. Those nightmares had played in her mind, over and over again, when she was younger. Up until Saints and Sinners 168

she was about fourteen she dreamed about the explosion almost every night. Four years of hellish nightmares with no comfort in sight, but then they stopped. The nightmares just vanished as if they were never there.

Perhaps her mind had finally found a way to let her dream in peace. But after her captivity, after she returned home, she started to have the nightmares again. They briefly alternated with memories about what happened in Central America, but mostly, those dreams replayed the last few minutes before her father died over and over again. She could almost remember the conversation clearly. After he died she had written down what he had said to her that morning when he dropped her off, she never wanted to forget his words. She had even drawn a picture of him, trying to commit him to absolute memory, but what she didn’t have was his voice.

She couldn’t remember his voice. Was it deep or high pitched? She thought it was deep—at least that’s how she remembered it anyway.

The past few nights her father’s last moments of life hadn’t invaded her dreams. Instead, she had dreamed of Sully and his mother and Teagan. She had dreamed of being at his home, being his wife, being Teagan’s mother, and having Maureen as her mother-in-law. She would bet anything that she would seem more like a mother than her own mother had. Alaina had happy dreams; dreams that would probably never be a reality, but it didn’t matter, because she preferred the happy to the sad any day.

When she awoke that morning, Sully had assured her that she would be safer at Thomas’ office so he carted her down there and left her Capri Montgomery 169

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with Janet, the very friendly secretary, before going off with Thomas for the day. She had been bored out of her mind. She needed to stay busy, needed to work on something. She borrowed a pencil from Janet and a few sheets of computer paper and she sketched a picture of Janet that she could give to her son if she wanted. From her previous experience, Alaina knew just how important it was for children to have an abundance of pictures of their parents…especially the ones who loved them.

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T
ony had done the one fool thing they had hoped he would do; he had gone to Lila’s apartment in the dark hours of the morning, ready to kill her. He hadn’t tried that first night, fortunately Thomas hadn’t thought that it was over and he had camped out one more time. Thomas managed to thwart the attempt before Tony could carry it out. The weapons the police found in his car had been a great assistance. And because of his connection to the force, he and Sully were allowed to question Tony first.

“I don’t have to tell you squat,” he had insisted.

“Is she worth going to prison for? Are you that loyal to Ms.

James?” Thomas asked, trying to get Tony to realize the brevity of his own situation so that he would do what most people did, try to save himself by turning over evidence on the person in charge.

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Tony laughed. “Ms. James? Please. She’s nothing, less than nothing. The two of you aren’t bright at all,” he laughed.

“Then educate us,” Sully snarled. “Who do you work for? Who hired you to kill those people?”

“I owe him my father’s life,” he shook his head. “If it weren’t for him, my father would have gotten himself killed with all those stupid gambling debts. I won’t turn on the man now. Not ever. And since you have no proof that I killed any of those people…I’ll walk by lunch time,” he held his head high, confident in his ability to get away with it.

“
Him
? Who is he?” Sully looked at him.

“While you’re here badgering me, who’s with that hot little number you’re supposed to be protecting?” Sully felt the chill race down his spine. He had left her at the townhouse this time. He had left her unprotected. “Shit,” he barked as he ran out the interrogation room. If he didn’t get to her in time, if he didn’t save her, he would never forgive himself—never.

“You’re alive,” Alaina’s shock registered in her voice. It wasn’t possible. He had died. He had been in that car and she saw it blow up. She saw him die. “After all this time,” she shook her head trying to clear the fog of emotions. This was her father, and he was alive. But if he had been alive all that time then where had he been, why had he let her think he was Saints and Sinners 172

dead? If she weren’t seeing him right now, standing in front of her with a gun in his hand, she still wouldn’t believe it.

“I needed her to pay for what she had done to me. You were just a…casualty,” he let those words flow from his lips effortlessly. “I tried to leave you out of it as much as I could. I wasn’t going to blow the car until Trey dropped you off at home. I figured, as he backed out the driveway I could do it then, but then you, you were the same perfectly dimwitted Alaina. I always loved that about you—the fact that you could forget some things and never forget others. You getting out of that car to go back for your book bag gave me the perfect opportunity. Blow the car, have two credible witnesses. It was perfect. Your tears were heart wrenching, for a moment, but then I remembered why I had done what I did. I knew there was no going back.”

He had murdered a man. He had tried to kill her. “I take it he didn’t know what you had planned or he wouldn’t have agreed to be in that car.”

Sean laughed. “No, he didn’t know. I made up a story about needing a few months away without being fully away. He looked so much like me with his build, height, and skin tone…we could have been twins, except for some features on his face. That’s where the good doctor came in. After he finished with him he looked exactly like me. I coached him for speech perfection, made sure his tone was correct. He had a tendency to speak like a businessman anyway, so all seemed perfect. Except for the Capri Montgomery 173

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scar. I didn’t think anybody would really notice. Liz and I hadn’t touched each other in years. And you, well…you would have been easy to fool.” She had seen the scar, she had never noticed it before…at least she hadn’t thought she had, but she had dismissed it. “I would have asked about it eventually.”

“I know. But what I had planned would have been done before you had a chance to ask. He thought he was picking you up from school as a test run to see if he could pull it off. I guess he did,” he laughed again.

“Nobody noticed a thing.”

“You did all of this to get back a Liz? You had me abducted—”

“I made sure they didn’t hurt you. They were paid well not to hurt you. I should have known Liz would do something that would still make her look like a hero. My plan had failed too many times. My death was supposed to show her up for the bitch that she was, but it didn’t. Instead she came off looking like a hero, a mother who should be praised for getting you through tough times. Having you abducted wasn’t my first option, Alaina. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Tony had told me of her plans to run for president and I knew this was my way to make her tip her hand, show her cards…but that failed too. She sent the best man in for you and the tax payers didn’t care that it cost a mint to do it. Her popularity rating shot up. The only thing left, the only thing I could do, was this.”

“Kill me? You could kill your own daughter?” Saints and Sinners 174

“I have to. With Tony linked to this…the rumors will fly so fast that she won’t win. There’s no way she can win.” He was so sure of himself, so sure this was the only way.

“I trusted you. I loved you. I worshiped the ground you walked on because you were my father and you couldn’t do anything half as bad as Liz. My whole life I’ve spent walking around remembering you as a good man and in reality you’re no better than she is. You hate her so much that you can’t even see you are her.” She was angry, but that wasn’t part of the pain that was ripping her apart from the inside out. Her entire life had been a lie, both of her parents were fanatically crazy selfish people, and now she knew it. All these years and now she knew the fairytale memory, the prince she thought her father was, had all been lies.

“Don’t say that,” he refocused the gun on her, moving it higher to point at her heart.

“You killed Troy too, didn’t you?”

“He got too close, figured everything out. He started digging, trying to figure out why those idiot bastards that went to prison for my murder was sitting on death row when the evidence had been so shaky against them. The more he dug, the more he found…he found out I was alive. He found out I had the doctors killed to cover my tracks. He found that nurse,” he shook his head. “She didn’t know what she had, but that man of yours was sharp. He figured it out. Tony set up a fake meeting; he offered him something more than speculation to write for his story. He offered him irrefutable proof. But no, I didn’t kill him—not directly. I Capri Montgomery 175

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only took out Trey and Doctor Robert Faulkner the senior. Tony handled everything else.”

So that was what Troy had went to pick up, proof that he thought was going to break open the case, set two innocent—mostly innocent—men free. They were sitting on death row for a crime they didn’t commit. “How could you? Did you hate us that much? Did you hate me that much?”

“This wasn’t about you, Alaina. He found out and he had to be shut up. He was going to tell you, and you would have advised him to do the right thing, to tell his story to the police, to the world. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I watched you die,” she said absently. “Do you have any idea how much that hurt me? Then you took away Troy. You might not have been the person to execute that supposed accident, but you killed him. You’re responsible for all of those deaths. You’re a murderer. You destroy without mercy and you cover it with blankets of excuses that mean nothing to the people whose life you ruin.”

“Shut up,” he said it so calmly, but the timbers of his voice sent fear rocketing through her. He would kill her. He had to kill her. She was the only person left who knew he was alive—other than Tony. She figured he would probably kill him too if need be.

“You and Liz were perfect for each other. As much as you hated her, you never realized you are her. You’re evil, vindictive, selfish…the Saints and Sinners 176

difference is, Liz never killed anybody to get ahead. So maybe in that respect, she’s better than you.”

“Alaina all grown up,” he took the safety off his gun. “I liked you better when you were a dimwitted kid. Your mouth now just reminds me that you are your mother’s child. With one bullet I’m going to be able to put you and the world out of its misery. You’ll die, and Tony will admit that he overheard Liz hiring a man to murder you. It’s perfect. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.” He shrugged. “Lights out, Alaina.” She heard two shots, saw her father’s body hit the floor just before hers. Events didn’t register until she saw Sully bursting through the front door. The side door window had been shot out. He had shot it out. He had shot her father, and her father had shot her.