Dare (32 page)

Harley

It was all a ruse.

I remembered that now. I left him, told everyone it was because of his lies about Margaret, about their short-lived marriage when they were seventeen. As if something like that would convince me to walk away from the love of my life. I was angry all right. But not enough to do more than yell and scream for a while. I wanted to hurt him, I did. I wanted to hurt him the way it hurt me to find out the way I did. I mean, who wants to go to the county clerk to get their marriage license just to find out that their significant other had lied about his past?

But I would have understood after he explained it to me.

They were nineteen. Margaret was being pressured by her father to marry the son of a prominent businessman—a client—who would have brought millions into her father’s law firm. It was a business deal, and Margaret wasn’t about to be used as a pawn in her father’s games. So she went to Xander while he was attending Stanford and asked him to marry her. It was in name only. They never lived together and never shared as much as a kiss. But the marriage license protected her from her father’s plot almost in the same way it threatened our own marriage.

It was nothing, just as he’d said.

But it was also a symptom in the disease that was Grant Wallace.

“The flowers were a nice touch.”

Xander chuckled, his mouth against my head so that the heat of his breath spread and pressed against my skull.

“I thought it would be something someone desperate to get a woman’s attention would do. Not me, of course…”

“Because you know I hate flowers.”

“But no one else knew that, except maybe your folks. But I guess all your dad saw was that I’d hurt you.”

“He was trying to protect me.”

He kissed the top of my head again. “I know.”

“It was comforting, seeing you sitting in your car in front of the house though.”

“Yeah?”

“I thought about inviting you in a few times in the middle of the night. But I was afraid someone might see.”

“They were clearly watching. Otherwise, I don’t think they would have gone after you like they did.”

My thoughts darkened, turning to that morning. I’d been expecting something like that…it was like there were monsters hiding around every corner I turned. But I never expected it to come like that.

“Do you remember?”

“I remember getting out of bed that morning. Calling Philip before I got dressed.”

Xander’s arms tightened slightly at the mention of my ex-boyfriend. He hadn’t thought that was a good idea, but Philip was the only person I could think of—the only person I knew—who might be able to help us. Philip was a high school history teacher in Dallas now. But his father was a politician. There were connections there that were incredibly helpful in our situation.

I craned my neck to look at him. “He said to tell you hi. I remember that, too.”

Xander kissed the tip of my nose. “Consider me told.”

“I remember grabbing my fanny pack, fastening it around my waist. I grabbed my keys and my cellphone. Then I was on the sidewalk, half expecting to see you somewhere behind me.”

“I had a meeting.”

I closed my eyes, the morning playing out behind my eyelids. I could actually feel the sidewalk under my shoes, the earbuds in my ears. I remember thinking an inability to hear was probably a bad idea, but I couldn’t jog without music. But I couldn’t remember much beyond that.

“Did they ever talk to the person who hit me?”

“No. In fact, they kind of suggested it was a hit and run.”

“Suggested?”

Xander shook his head. “I called the police a couple of times, but they refused to give me much information because I’m not technically family. And Philip told me that his contacts thought it was unrelated.”

“How could it be unrelated?”

“That’s what I said. But he wouldn’t talk about it with me.”

“He still doesn’t trust you.”

Xander shrugged. “Probably because I’m the one who dragged you into all of this. I wouldn’t trust me either.”

All of this.

All of this?
I’m always confused, I think. But here’s the thing: Xander stumbled onto proof that Grant and his law firm were involved in some pretty shady real estate deals. It wasn’t anything new, really. Xander had known for years that Grant skated on the thin line between legal and illegal or immoral for years. He didn’t bat an eye at this until he had a customer tell him some interesting facts about a new building going up downtown. It was owned by a corporation out of Sacramento. Legally. In reality, the real owners were a group of men out of the Middle East who were doing everything they could to avoid the restrictions placed on businesses based in their part of the world—preventing them from doing work in the United States. And then Xander learned that Grant was working with other such groups, groups with ties to terror groups. It was all based around real estate and seemed innocent enough. But the more Xander learned about the deals, the more he realized just how deep Grant was in the whole thing. And how deep his mother was.

He tried to talk to her about it, but she was in love with Grant—had been for thirty years—and she wasn’t about to listen to Xander on anything that made Grant look less than the hero she always felt he was. And then he realized that Margaret was involved in some way, too.

That’s when he went to the FBI. Not long after that was when I found out.

He asked me to leave him because he was afraid Grant would find out what he was doing. And that’s exactly what happened. Grant confronted him three days after I moved out of the house.

But we had a plan.

“You don’t remember who was behind the wheel of the car?”

“I don’t remember the car at all.”

“How did we get ourselves into this mess?”

I shrugged—even as I snuggled closer to him. He tightened his grip on me, his hands moving slowly down the length of my arms.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said softly. “One way or the other…”

“I know.”

I crawled to my feet and pushed the rollaway shelf out of the way again. In the safe were two simple gold rings, a man’s and a woman’s. I sat back down in his lap and lifted his hand, sliding the ring onto his left ring finger.

“This is why I came up here,” I said, as he took my ring and did the same. “I had to make sure this memory was real.”

“It is, baby,” he whispered against my lips. “You are my wife.”

“And you are my husband.”

He picked me up and carried me downstairs, wrapping his body around me as we settled back under the sheets on our bed. I closed my eyes, the emotional and physical exhaustion of the night finally catching up to me. As I slowly began to drift to sleep, I let my mind wander. At first, all these different thoughts moved through my mind, mostly memories of the last three years that were still slowly coming back from that damaged place in my mind. And then my mind’s eye kept going back to tonight, to the conversation I had with Jonnie in the bathroom.

There was something about the way she’d been looking at me.

She knew about Grant, and she knew what Xander had been up to. She answered his calls, planned his days. She’d guessed that something was wrong. It was my decision to let her in on some of the details, just enough so that she would stop asking questions.

Maybe that hadn’t been the right choice.

As sleep played at the edges of my consciousness, a new memory began to play out in my mind:

I was jogging down Third Street, thinking about the day’s activities. Philip had arranged for me to meet with this FBI agent. He was working undercover at the
Times
as a lifestyles reporter. We were hoping everyone would think we were talking about the mural at the community center. I was so close to finishing, I could already see the completed work in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t wait to get back to it. It was probably the best thing I’d done in my short career. And then I heard the squeal of tires. I looked over my shoulder and…

…and I saw the face of the person who ran me down.             

Harley

My eyes popped open, and I stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out the images that were playing over and over again inside my head. It had to be my imagination trying to make sense of the flood of memories that suddenly came back to me tonight. It was the only thing it could be.

She couldn’t possibly be the one who ran me down with her car!

The last six months have been insane. One minute I was engaged to marry the man I loved, the next I was leaving him and calling off the wedding, telling everyone it was because he lied to me about a brief marriage to his friend—and my mentor—Margaret Wallace. But in truth, I left him because he was embroiled in a mess involving Margaret’s father, and we’d concocted a scheme to pull us both out of the fire before it was too late.

I had a friend, an ex-boyfriend really, whose father had connections. My friend, Philip, arranged to help us deliver proof of Grant Wallace’s business dealings with suspected terrorist groups to an undercover FBI agent who was already working on the case. It was slow coming together—painfully slow—leaving Xander and I estranged for months. But it was finally going to happen; I was finally going to talk to this agent—who was pretending to be a reporter—but that same day, I was mowed down by a car while jogging.

I broke my leg, my collarbone, and a couple of ribs. However, the worst injury was a cracked skull that caused swelling in my brain. I was in a medically induced coma for a little over two weeks. When I woke, I’d lost three years of memories. I had no idea who Xander was.

How hard that must have been for him!

I couldn’t remember our courtship. I couldn’t remember moving in with him or all the lovely moments we spent together. I remembered our engagement after he showed me pictures of us together, but I couldn’t remember planning a big, beautiful wedding that would have been perfect. Nor did I remember that during our estrangement, we managed to sneak away for a weekend, marrying on the day we chose—just without all the fanfare we’d originally planned.

I remember now. We went to a party last night, and when we came home…well, when I fell asleep hours later, my memories just came back as if some sort of wall had crumbled. The memories were still coming back, all the little details that make memories stick.

But there were still so many questions left unanswered. The biggest ones were, who ran me down and was it connected to what Xander and I were planning to do?

Philip, my college boyfriend and the friend who was helping us, told Xander that it was likely unconnected. But that didn’t sound right to me. I’d heard Xander’s mother, Bonnie, talking to Margaret in the bathroom at the party tonight. It hadn’t made sense at the time because I didn’t know what she was talking about. But now? Now, it scared the crap out of me because she basically admitted that she knew what I’d been planning on doing, which meant Grant knew. They didn’t appear to know that Xander was involved, which was why I insisted we had to separate while we worked everything out—to protect him. But they knew what I was doing, at least as far as talking to a reporter. Did that also mean they were involved in the hit and run that left me without my memories?

Bonnie denied it to Margaret, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. And my memories…

I couldn’t be remembering things right.

I looked over at Xander. He was sleeping soundly on his side, his breaths coming in slow, steady puffs of air. I touched his shoulder, my fingers tracing a pattern over his warm skin. He didn’t move; he didn’t respond at all. Poor man was exhausted. The last six months had been much more difficult than either of us could have imagined.

I pressed my lips to his shoulder and climbed out of bed, dressing in his discarded shirt—I loved having the scent of him surrounding me!—and a pair of sweats I’d left behind in the closet. I left the room quietly, closing the door with as much care as possible.

I needed to talk to Philip. I needed to know if my memories were playing games with me.

My whole world turned upside down when I caught Xander with those papers—papers with Grant Wallace’s signature on them—and heard the story he had to tell.

Xander-Six Months Ago…

I walked into the bedroom to find her taking her clothes out of the closet and piling them on the bed. My heart was in my throat as I tried to explain that the snafu at the county clerk’s office was easily remedied. We could still get married and live out our dreams. I was hanging on to that notion.

“Harley, it’s a mistake. I’ll get it cleared up, and we’ll get our marriage license just like we planned.”

“I don’t think I want to marry a man who would lie to me.”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

“It was an omission. That’s the same thing.”

“You told me not to tell you. Do you remember that?”

She tossed a handful of clothes on the bed before she turned to me, her hands on her hips.

“You are not blaming this on me!”

“You didn’t want to know about my past; you didn’t want to know about the women in my life.”

“I wasn’t talking about marriages! You made me believe that I was the first woman in your life whom you wanted to marry, but now I found out that you were married before—”

“To a friend! To someone who needed help escaping a bad situation. It was not a love match.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Yes. Because you love me and you trust me.”

“How can I trust you when you lied to me about something so important?”

“You’ve got to stop, Harley,” I said, grabbing her arms and pulling her over to the bed. I only wanted to force her to sit, but she fought back and tried to pull away. She ripped at my arms and tore at my shirt. The papers fell out in a shower of insanity. I’d forgotten about them; I’d forgotten the most dangerous thing I’d ever done because of the threat of losing the only thing that had ever mattered to me.

She went still as she watched the last of them fall.

“What the…?”

I bent to grab them, but she’d already knelt, grabbing a few incriminating pieces of paper before I could stop her.

“Where did you get these?”

I tried to take them from her, but she held them so tightly that they would have torn if I’d continued to fight her. So I picked up the others and stood, crossing the room as I tried to figure out what to say.

“This one has Grant’s signature on it.”

I knew that. That’s why I took it.

“And this one…is that your mom’s signature? Xander? What’s going on?”

I could hear the shock and disbelief in her voice. I wished I’d felt the same when I realized just how deeply involved they were. But I couldn’t, because I really wasn’t surprised.

I slid the folder out from under my shirt where I’d thought sticking it into the top of my pants would keep it secure—like I was some sort of spy from the 1950s. I had the same information on a flash drive in my pocket, but those didn’t have signatures on them. They said they needed signatures, the one time in this automated society when an electronic signature wouldn’t do.

I tossed it all onto the low table in front of the television and sat heavily on the loveseat.

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I had never wanted to tell her; I never wanted to get her involved. But it was becoming more and more obvious that there was no other way.

“I always knew that Grant skirted that line, the line between right and wrong. I knew a lot of his business dealings were questionable. But, you know, that’s the way it is with lawyers in this town.”

“But these…” Harley waved the papers in the air in front of me. “These are—”

“I know. I found out about this a year ago.”

It was a new client. His name was Randall Thomas, and he owned a technology company with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. It was a huge contract that would push my fledgling company into a company with a solid future. Randy had friends in high places, friends who told him things. And he shared a few of those things with me over lunch one afternoon.

“Your mom works for Grant Wallace, right?”

“She does.”

“For a long time?”

I set my wine glass down and looked over at Randy. We’d been talking about football a moment ago, so the change in subject was a little jarring.

“Since I was a toddler. Why?”

Randy looked down at his plate for a moment, as though weighing his next words. “I’m not really at liberty to talk about such things,” he said in a slow, deliberate tone, “but you’ve proved to be an honest man in our business dealings, and I would feel like a hypocrite if I didn’t say something.”

“Alright,” I said, wondering what the hell he was getting at.

“A friend of mine works with Homeland Security. And he’s mentioned a new investigation taking place in Los Angeles. Something to do with business deals involving members of ISIS.”

He didn’t need to say much more. And he didn’t. But the look he gave said more than words ever could.

An FBI agent called me a few days later.

“They told me that they’d been monitoring communications coming into and going out of Grant’s office for some time, but Grant was too smart, too careful. They couldn’t prove anything.”

“They asked you to help.”

I ran my palms over the top of my pants, wiping away the sweat that always gathered there when I thought about these things. It made me sick to my stomach and wish that I’d never gone to that lunch with Randy, that I’d never agreed to take on his contract. But I had and now I had to deal with the fallout.

“I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought that maybe it was a misunderstanding. The government had become so paranoid since the attacks on the eleventh of September. They saw conspiracies where none had ever existed. I wanted to believe that was what was happening now.”

“But…”

I looked at Harley and remembered how all I wanted during that time was to go to her in Texas and forget about all of this. I even considered giving up my business, leaving behind all my friends and my mom, leaving everything behind to be with her and run from this craziness.

“I began investigating on my own. Grant was one of my first customers in the security firm. I did something I swore I would never do. I used my software to look around Grant’s computers and used my cameras to watch footage of the late night comings and goings of the people at his firm. And when that didn’t reveal anything truly incriminating, I used my access to install other software that he never agreed to. Spyware that could find things that Grant could never hide—no matter how smart or how inventive he was. Things the government would never find through legal channels.”

“They’re using you.” Harley gasped, as though she still believed in an honest and paternal government. “They set you up because they knew what you would do.”

“And I fell headlong into their trap.”

She sat beside me and slid her hand into mine.

“Are they guilty?”

I nodded. “Grant is helping some members of ISIS buy up real estate here in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago for reasons I can’t begin to guess. And he’s making it all look perfectly legal.”

“Does he know who…?”

“Grant is a very intelligent man. And he’s taking a hell of a lot of money for these transactions, so much more than he would normally charge. So, yeah, I’d guess he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“And Homeland Security is trying to stop whatever ISIS is planning.”

“They are. And they’re using me to do it.” I again ran my hands over the leg of my pants. “I don’t think they’re just after Grant. I think they want to convince him to give details about the people he’s working with so they can get to them. Either way, of course, Grant’s going down.”

“And your mom, too.”

“And Mom, too.”

“And you?”

That was the one thing I’d recently begun to understand. The man I was dealing with at Homeland Security—or the FBI, I wasn’t sure which—was beginning to make me nervous with his demands. Grabbing the physical copies of property deeds and other contracts was so dangerous that it should have been a last ditch effort—especially since I’d given them reams of electronic data that should have been enough to leverage Grant.

“I don’t know. If Grant knew what I was doing…”

Harley took my hand and tugged it into her lap. “We can’t just sit back and let someone else run this whole thing for us. We have to have some control.”

“This doesn’t involve you. I’ve tried very hard—”

“I’m your fiancée,” she said, touching my face so that we were looking into each other’s eyes. “What affects you, affects me.”

I kissed her, wishing it wasn’t true. But I was also glad to finally have this burden off my shoulders, to finally be able to share it with someone.

“We have to do this our way,” she said a minute later. “The first thing we’re going to do is put these papers in my safe and keep them.”

“What about my contact?”

“Tell him you couldn’t get them. And then tell him you’ve had second thoughts about this whole thing.”

“He won’t like that. He’s already threatened me with jail time if I don’t cooperate fully.”

“But what’s he going to get you on? You aren’t involved.”

“It’s the government. They can do whatever they want.”

“I’m gonna call Philip. His father just got elected to the Senate. He’ll know someone who can help us.”

“Harley—”

“And we’ll have to break up.”

“What? Wait a minute!” I climbed to my feet, my eyes moving to the pile of clothes still sitting on the bed. “I thought we were past all that?”

“We are.” She was almost laughing, as she took hold of the front of my shirt and made me look at her. “We are. It’s only for appearances.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to tell Grant and your mother that I stumbled across some information in your office, and you think I might use it against them to hurt you because of our bad breakup.”

I studied her, wondering if she was completely insane or the smartest woman I’d ever met.

“That way, if they know what you’ve been doing, they’ll think I’m behind it.”

“Harley, I can’t let you do that.”

“You can and you will. That’s the only way we can protect you.”

“And what about you?”

“You’ll watch over me. So will Philip.”

I groaned because the idea of relying on her ex-boyfriend—the one who hurt her so badly that it took months for me to win her trust—and getting him involved in this was just unappetizing. But I was beginning to see her logic. The more she talked…

This had to work out the way she said it would. Or things would never be the same again.