Paradise Wild (33 page)

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ALL I NEED IS YOU

by Johanna Lindsey

the sequel to
A Heart So Wild

What happens when a New York sophisticate
has a run-in with a female bounty hunter?

Find out in Ms. Lindsey’s captivating romance

New York, 1892

I
t was actually a beautiful night in early spring, the night Damian Rutledge III’s world fell apart. Everything had gone right that day: the flowers had been delivered to Winnifred shortly before Damian arrived to pick her up, the engagement ring he’d designed had been finished that morning. They had even reached the restaurant on time, for once the heavy city traffic not interfering with his schedule. And dinner had been superb. He was going to ask the big question as soon as he took Winnifred home.

Her father had already approved the match. His father had been delighted. They made a perfect couple, he the heir to Rutledge Imports, she the heir to C.W. & L. Company. It wouldn’t be just a marriage, but a joining of the two largest import companies in the city.

But then Sergeant Johnson of the 21st precinct had shown up at their table as they were finishing dessert. The policeman had requested a few private words with Damian. They had walked out to the lobby.

Damian had been in shock ever since.

He wasn’t sure if he’d asked the sergeant to escort Winnifred home. He had raced to the offices of Rut
ledge Imports. The lights were all ablaze. The office was usually closed by 5
P.M.
, but occasionally one or another of the employees stayed late to catch up on paperwork, including Damian’s father…but rarely this late of an evening. Even the cleaning crew was usually finished by this time. But then the only ones working there now were members of the New York City police department.

There were two ornate flagpoles, one on each side of the door in the large, high-ceilinged office. The body was still hanging from one of them. Every July, for the entire month, an American flag was hung from each flagpole. Throughout the rest of the year, the poles supported an assortment of hanging plants. The plants on the one pole had been tossed aside, leaving dirt and broken leaves on the cream-colored carpet, and now supported the body instead.

If the walls weren’t made of brick, a body that size couldn’t have hung there, dangling some six inches from the floor. But no, these poles were made of steel and reinforced in the brick, so they would never sag. Two hundred pounds hanging from the one, and it hadn’t bent at all.

So close to the floor, yet so far away. Shoes might have made a difference, might have allowed the body to get support on tiptoe, at least for a little while, but the shoes had been removed. Yet the arms weren’t restrained either. Those powerful arms could have easily reached the flagpole to keep the pressure of that single rope off the neck. The chair, too, that had been placed just under the flagpole, was still there; it hadn’t been kicked over but was still in reach.

“Cut him down.”

No one heard Damian. Three men had tried to stop him from entering the office, until they heard who he
was. The men were too busy sifting through what they deemed evidence to pay attention to a choked voice. Damian had to shout to be heard.

“Cut him down!”

That got their attention, and one uniformed officer blustered indignantly, “Who the hell are you?”

Damian still hadn’t taken his eyes off the body. “I’m his son.”

He heard several mutterings of sympathy as they cut Damian Rutledge II down—pointless, meaningless words that barely penetrated his shock. His father was dead, the only person on the face of the earth that he really and truly cared about. He had no other relatives. His mother didn’t count. She had divorced his father when Damian was still a child and had gone off to marry her lover, causing quite a scandal at the time. Damian had never seen her again and had no desire to. She had been, and would remain, dead in his heart. But his father…

Winnifred didn’t count either. He’d planned to marry her, but he didn’t love her. He had been hopeful that they would get along splendidly. After all, he could find no fault with her. She was beautiful, refined, and would make a fine mother for the children they would have. At present, though, he couldn’t even call her his fiancée, could think of her as little more than a stranger. But his father…

What few friends he had didn’t count either. After his mother’s rejection and abandonment, he’d never let anyone get really close. It was simpler that way. It kept emotional pain out of his life. But his father…

“—obvious suicide,” he heard next, then, “There’s even a note.” And this was shoved in front of Damian’s face.

When he was able to focus on the words, he read, “I tried to get over it, Damian, but I can’t. Forgive me.”

He snatched the note out of the policeman’s hand and read it again…and again. It looked like his father’s writing, if a bit shaky. The note also looked like it had been stuffed in something, a pocket or a fist.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“On the desk—in the center of it, actually. Hard to miss.”

“There is fresh stationery in that desk,” Damian pointed out. “Why would this note be crumpled if it was written just before…?”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. The policeman he’d looked at merely shrugged.

But another suggested, “He could have been carrying that note around for days, while he made up his mind.”

“And brought his own rope, too? That rope didn’t come from this office.”

“Then obviously he did bring it along,” was the easy reply, then, “Look, Mr. Rutledge, I know it ain’t easy to accept when someone you know takes their own life, but it happens. Do you know what it was that he couldn’t get over, as the note says?”

“No, my father didn’t have
any
reason to kill himself.”

“Well…looks like he felt differently.”

Damian’s eyes turned a wintery gray, pale as shadowed snow. “You’re just going to accept that as fact? You’re not even going to look into the possibility that he was murdered?”

“Murdered?” The man all but smirked. “There’s easier and much quicker ways to kill yourself than dangling from a rope. Know how long it takes to actually die from hanging? It ain’t quick unless the neck snaps,
and his didn’t. And there’s easier and much quicker ways for murder to be done than by hanging.”

“Unless you want it to look like suicide.”

“A bullet in the head would have done the trick if that were the case. Look, do you see any signs of struggle here? And there is nothing to indicate that your father’s hands had been tied, so that he couldn’t prevent the hanging. How many men do you think it would take to hang a man his size, if he didn’t want to be hung? One or two wouldn’t have managed it. Three or more? Why? What motive? Did your father keep money here? Anything of value missing that you can see? Did he have any enemies that hated him enough to kill him?”

The answers were no and no and no, but Damian didn’t bother to say it. They had drawn their conclusions based on the evidence at hand. He couldn’t even blame them for settling on what looked so obvious. Why should they dig any deeper just on his say so, when they could finish their paperwork on this and go on to the next crime? Trying to convince them that this was a crime that needed further investigation would be a waste of his time and theirs.

He still tried. He spent two more hours trying, until each policeman had come up with an excuse to leave. Sure, they’d look into it, they had assured him, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. Sop for the grieving relative. They would have said anything at that point just to get out of there.

It was midnight before Damian entered the town house he shared with his father. It was a huge, old mansion, too big for just two men, which is why Damian had never moved out when he had come of age. He and his father had lived there companionably, neither getting in the other’s way, yet both accessible when one or the other felt like conversation.

He looked at his home now and found it—empty. Never again would he share breakfast with his father before they left for the office. Never again would he find his father in his study, or in the library late of an evening where they read and discussed the classics. Never again would they talk business over dinner. Never again…

The wealth of tears that he had been holding back came now and wouldn’t stop. Damian didn’t make it up to his room, but there were no servants about at that hour to see his lapse from stern rigidity. He poured a glass of brandy that was kept on his bureau for when he had trouble sleeping, but he was too choked up to drink it.

He would find out what had really happened, because he would never accept that his father had ended his own life. There was no evidence to the contrary, no sign of struggle, yet Damian knew his father had been murdered. He knew his father too well, they had been too close.

Damian Senior wasn’t a man who prevaricated or attempted pretense. He never lied, because he gave himself away anytime he tried. So if something had been so terribly wrong to lead to desiring death as the only alternative, Damian would have known about it. Yet they had been planning a wedding. There had even been talk of remodeling the west wing of the house for more privacy if Damian wanted to bring his wife there to live. And Damian’s father had been looking forward to having grandchildren to spoil. He had been waiting several years now for Damian to settle down and start a family of his own.

Besides all that, Damian Senior had been genuinely happy with his life. He had no desire to ever marry again. He was perfectly content with the mistress he
kept. He was wealthy in his own right but had also inherited a large fortune. And he loved the business that he ran, that had been founded by his own father, Damian I, and that he had since expanded very successfully. He had everything to live for.

But someone had felt otherwise.
Forgive me?
No, those weren’t his father’s words. There was nothing to forgive his father for. But there was much to avenge.