table was a silent bonus.
This was a team he could trust. Just like that drill this afternoon—they’d get the job done. Together.
Sure, maybe he was looking to redeem himself in Charlotte’s eyes. Maybe he couldn’t make her feel safe, or put the woman at ease, but he damn sure could handle a little routine security and crowd control. He could ensure that she found the privacy she needed to deal with her grief.
And maybe that knowledge, at last, would put his guilty conscience to rest.
Chapter Five
Charlotte’s palm was sweaty around the wrapped bouquet of white roses she’d been clinging to for the past twenty minutes.
While Max chewed on his new leash at her feet, she sat at the tinted back window of her father’s limo, secretly watching the mourners huddled around a green tent some fifty yards from where the driver had parked near the beginning of the procession line. Her head ached with a terrible mix of guilt and grief. The sweeping hillside, studded with tall trees and marble markers, was curtained by rain and shadows, giving a twilight cast to the afternoon service.
The event-planning team her father had hired to put together a reception at the house later was to be commended for stepping in to help with the ceremony here, as well. Not only had they taken over the task of coordinating transportation from Mt. Washington Cemetery to the estate, they’d issued umbrellas to any guest who’d shown up for the wet proceedings without one.
Like a sea of black mushrooms sprouting across the hillside, the faceless mourners only added to Charlotte’s unsettled nerves. Logically, she understood there were people here she knew and could trust. But she couldn’t see any of them. Her father and stepmother would be standing beneath the awning with the family and minister. Audrey and Alex were there, too. She’d seen him drive up in his black SWAT uniform earlier, no doubt taking a break from work to attend the service with his fiancée. But without the anchor of a trusted friend or family member to cling to, an illogical sense of isolation was creeping in, making Charlotte question the impulse to pay her personal respects to an old friend.
A flicker of movement at the edge of the crowd caught her attention and she shifted in her seat. Her stepbrother, Kyle Austin, turned away from the ceremony to check his watch. The shoulders of his tailored gray suit lifted with a deep breath and another check of the time before he disappeared beneath his umbrella again. While she’d grown up with Richard Eames, the Austins had been part of the family for less than two years, and Kyle was such a workaholic at her father’s real estate development company that he barely knew the staff’s name. He was here strictly as a courtesy to her father.
Drawn to another ripple of movement, she spotted her stepsister Bailey’s strawberry blond hair. She was standing with her arm linked to a tall blond man. Charlotte squinted. If he bent down from beneath that umbrella and whispered to Bailey just one more time … Harper Pierce? Charlotte smiled as he kissed her stepsister’s cheek, recognizing the society prince she’d once gone to school with.
In the very next breath, she frowned. Harper had proposed to their classmate Gretchen Cosgrove last year. According to her best friend Audrey, within a month after Gretch was murdered, he’d made a play for her. Audrey, of course, an eloquent woman who rarely minced words, told him in no uncertain terms that Alex Taylor was the man she loved and Harper needed to move on.
Now he was spending time with Bailey? They knew each other well enough to hold hands and exchange a kiss? When had that happened? Gretchen had been dead for only four months. A man that desperate for constant female companionship seemed a far cry from the high-school soccer hero she’d once had a major crush on. When she was sixteen, even though he’d never looked at her as anything other than his study buddy, she’d willingly typed Harper’s papers and tutored him in whatever subject he struggled with in order to maintain the academic standards needed to play sports at Sterling Academy.
The notion of high school and longing for a boy of her own turned her memories to the stupid choice she’d made with one of Harper’s teammates the night of the prom. It was a plain girl’s foolish mistake to turn down attending with a friend and accept Landon Turner’s invitation. Finding out he’d issued the invitation on a lousy hundred-dollar dare, and had another girl waiting for him at the dance, had led to a humiliating exit. And to the man waiting in the parking lot. And the speeding van and the …
“Nope.” Charlotte turned away from the window, thinking she could turn away from the memories, as well. “I’m not reliving that nightmare again.”
And yet she was. Right now. Hiding away in a car because she was so damn afraid of some other stranger out there. How was she any less free of her kidnappers now than when they’d held her down and cut off part of her ear as proof of life for her father?
Landon had paid for his unwitting collusion with the kidnappers by being kicked out of Sterling Academy and losing his most prestigious scholarship offers. Once he’d outgrown the need to play pranks on the school’s resident bookworm, he probably had gone on to lead a normal, successful life.
But she was still paying for that night. She was still afraid, still obeying the threat that her kidnappers would find her and hurt her even worse, in any number of ways, if she tried to escape and trust her own decisions and be free again.
With a weighty, sorrowful sigh, she pulled her black trench coat more tightly around the skirt and sweater she wore. She let her fingers slide into her pocket to touch the brand-new phone with the unlisted number that her father had given her. She could call for help anytime she needed to. Too bad there wasn’t a number she could call to make her feel truly warm and confident and normal again.
When the low tones of “Amazing Grace” filtered in through the walls of the limo, Charlotte turned her attention toward the green tent again. The service was winding down and people were moving, probably to lay a flower on the casket or express condolences to Mrs. Eames, her children and grandchildren. Charlotte’s heart rate picked up a notch in anticipation. She wanted to be one of those people trading hugs, holding someone close to share her grief.
But she couldn’t. Even if she could see some faces now, they were all strangers to her. How could she face them, wondering if the man who’d killed Richard and terrorized her was one of them? Was there someone else in that crowd waiting to knock her senseless and take her away from everything she knew and loved in exchange for her father’s money? Was there someone out there who wanted to kill her, too?
Besides, the mourners weren’t the only crowd at Mt. Washington today. Down at the bottom of the hill, at a restricted distance beyond the line of cars, was a gathering of reporters, complete with microphones and television cameras. They might be waiting for a glimpse of Jackson Mayweather or a sound bite from one of his stepchildren or second wife, but there’d be a crazy dash if they knew that, after ten years of hiding from Kansas City society, the Mad Miss Mayweather had ventured out of her ivory tower. And no matter how badly she wanted to pay her respects, she wouldn’t risk the potential media circus of her appearance detracting from the Eames family and the sadness of the day.
So she’d sit right where she was until the crowd cleared and her father came to get her to walk her up to the grave site.
When she realized she was watching the clock as closely as her time-obsessed stepbrother, Charlotte flipped her watch around on her wrist and reached down to scratch Max’s head. “We just need to be patient. After ten years of solitude, you’d think I’d know how to do that, right?”
Max answered with a sniff of her hand and a bored look in his round brown eyes. Leaving him to polish off
