Her 24-Hour Protector (15 page)

That would explain the frontline logo on Winston’s blue Cadillac.
“Do you know who killed my mother, Mrs. Epstein?” He couldn’t
not
think of Sara as his mother. As far as Lex was concerned, she was the beautiful young woman who had held him, loved him, laughed with him, praised him when he came home from school with good marks. Made his lunches, found Mr. Teddy when his bear got lost…held him tight when he was sad. He didn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone said—Sara Duncan
was
his mom. And no one was his father. Not as far as he was concerned.

“I don’t know who killed her, Lex,” she almost whispered. Fear, or some other emotion darkening her eyes and blanching her skin.

“Don’t lie to me. Not now.”

“All I can tell you, Lexington, is that it was one of Tony’s henchmen who did it, one who routinely handled Tony’s dirty—or as he called it—wet work.”

The one with a raspy voice who was inside this casino hotel this very minute. Still alive and kicking while his mother had been stone-cold dead for thirty years.

She inhaled shakily. “The first I heard of Sara’s death was when I opened the newspapers the morning after she was killed. I called Tony right away. As I mentioned, this was at a time when Frank and Tony were having a very serious falling out. Frank was insisting Tony return to Chicago, and Tony was refusing. It made for some very bad blood. Frank, however, had the upper hand…it’s a long story, but Tony figured he was going to get leverage by sending someone to kidnap you, and he was going to hold you—and me—ransom to get me to twist Frank’s arm. He said if I failed to change Frank’s mind, he was going to deliver the kid—you—to Frank in person. You were going to be the living flesh and blood proof of my infidelity and how I’d cheated him all those years.”

Mercedes took a deep swallow of water, and Lex noticed her hands were trembling. “It…it was a really foolish thing for Tony to do, but he was growing more and more irrational, and violent, and the excessive drinking and drugs he was taking didn’t help.” She hesitated, looked Lex directly in the eyes. “If you know who Tony Ciccone was, Lexington, as you say you do, then you’ll know the history and the rumors that circulated around him. You will know what people say he did. Frank needed to distance himself from all that, because he ran a clean operation.”

Like hell. Lex glared at her. “Go on.”

“But the kidnapping went wrong. Sara apparently hid you and shot and injured Tony’s man, and he fled when he heard the police coming.”

“Did this…man survive his gunshot injury?” Lex asked, seeing in his mind a replay…the checkered pants, the man’s hairy hands, the glint of the knife. His mother’s blood.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not telling the truth.”

“I have nothing I want to hide, Lexington. I am telling you this because I need to. I am ill—seriously ill—and the prognosis is grave. I might have only days left, weeks at the most. When things start to go wrong in my body, it will be fast. My husband doesn’t know I am sick. He doesn’t know any of what I am telling you.”

“Then why
are
you telling me.”

“I need to,” she said simply. She walked across the room, almost took a seat on a white chair, but restrained herself from showing weakness. Instead she forced her spine straight again. A proud woman, no doubt, but now that Lex looked carefully, under it, he could see a frailty. Under her artfully applied makeup was a face that was pale. Sick.

“When you approach the end of life, Lexington, and you look back over all that you have done…I…I just need to make peace with my God.” Her eyes glimmered again. “And to do this, I needed to see you, to look into the eyes of my son, and to tell you the truth. It’s my atonement. My absolution. This one thing I must do before I pass from this world.”

“So it’s for your own satisfaction. Because it’s clearly not for mine.”

“The truth, Lexington, it sets one free.”

“And this truth of your affair, what do you expect it will do to Frank?”

“You don’t need to tell him,” she stated.

“So the truth sets only certain people free?”

She said nothing.

Lex walked to the window, looked down at the city of sin and light. Of illusions, deception. Of promise, fate, fortune. And ruin.

“Will you tell him?” she asked very quietly.

“I’m a federal agent, Mrs. Epstein. You’ve just told me who is behind the unsolved murder of a woman. It’s a thirty-yearold cold case that could now, finally, find its way to closure. Frank will become part of that investigation, given his alliances with Ciccone, and the fact he is your husband.”

“Frank had nothing to do with Sara’s murder.”

“He did, Mrs. Epstein. He was the target of the kidnapping attempt that went wrong. He was the reason for it all.”

“And who would you see prosecuted at the end of it?” she asked. “Exactly who would stand trial—a dead man?”

“Justice must be done.”

“Tony Ciccone is
dead,
Lexington. Gone. There’s no one to arrest, no one to try in court. No need to bring it all up.”

“It never ceases to amaze me,” Lex said slowly, “how the Epsteins, the Rothchilds, the Schaeffers of this world truly think the rules apply differently to them—that you’re somehow above it all.”

She glanced at the street way below. “We are above it, Lexington,” she said softly. “It’s the way the world works. Money is power. Especially if you know how to use it.”

“Like Frank does.”

“Yes, like my husband. And all you will do is hurt him if you tell him about my infidelity. And he has infinite—and I mean
infinite
—power to hurt you back.”

“A threat?” Lex snorted derisively. “You have this desperate need to tell me that I am your son, to atone with your God, but you must threaten me at the same time?” He spun, strode toward the exit. “You people make me sick. Besides,
you have no proof you are my mother. I have no reason to believe it.”

“DNA will prove—”

“There’s no way in hell I’m taking a DNA test to find out
you
are my mother.” He stalked into the lobby, rammed the elevator button.

“Would it help if I told you where Tony Ciccone’s body is?” she called out.

Lex froze. He turned slowly, stepped back into the living room. “How do you know where he is? Did Frank kill him?”

“I did. I shot and killed the father of my child.”

Lex stared at her, heart pounding. “Why?”

“Because of what he did to Sara,” she said, the steel returning to her eyes, her neck corded tense. “And because his henchman allowed you to witness the horror. Because he allowed
my son
to become an orphan. The remorse, the guilt, it has been horrific to bear. It’s why I have always supported the Nevada Orphans Fund, Lexington. And until you left Reno, I always knew where you were. And then when I saw your name in the paper in connection with the Rothchild homicide case, I knew you’d come back to Nevada.”

She inhaled deeply. “Then I saw your name on that bachelor auction list, and I…” Her voice faded and tears began to stream down her cheeks. “It’s why I came to see you with my own eyes and why I bid on you that night. I pushed the bidding sky high because…because I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted that young Rothchild heiress to know just how much my boy was worth, and I wanted the orphans fund to get as much of her cash as she could give.”

Lex shook his head, staring at the woman who said she was his mother.

“You can’t put a dollar value on a person, on a baby.”

“This is Vegas, Lexington. People can buy what they like.”

Including a fake mother.

“Where’s Ciccone’s body?” he said coolly. “What did you do to him?”

Mercedes steadied herself by reaching for the back of a chair. “When I read about Sara’s murder in the paper, I phoned Tony right away, and I learned what he’d done. I set it up to meet him at a place in the desert, an isolated spot that Tony and I had been together before, a ghost town where they used to mine silver. I said I had something important to tell him about Frank, and that I was worried about being followed, so he had to be careful not to tell anyone or bring anyone. He trusted me, Lexington. Tony, in his way, adored me, and he had no idea just how much hatred he’d put into me. I shot him, out in that desert. I rolled his body down the mine shaft. He didn’t see it coming.”

The words of the Lucky Lady psychic sifted into his mind.
A past…death…buried in the Mojave sands…sands of time…death to be avenged…

Lex tried to swallow, trying to absorb what she was telling him—that she knew the answer to a mystery that gripped the nation thirty years ago, that she had killed a notorious Vegas gangster…and that gangster was his father.

“Why should I believe this?”

“Because I’ll tell you exactly in which mine shaft you will find Tony Ciccone’s remains, if there’s anything left of him.”

“Then, Mrs. Epstein, I’ll see that you are brought in and charged with homicide.”

A sad smile curled over her mouth. “I very much doubt, Lexington, that I will live long enough to see that.”

“Where’s the body?”

“At a small ghost town thirty miles southwest of Vegas, down a shaft in the old Conair silver mine. There’s a main headframe, easy to spot. Next to it is an old metal-sided building. If you go about two hundred yards east of that, you’ll
find another shaft opening covered with a metal grate. He’s down there.”

Lex studied her. This woman, this proud Vegas matriarch, an ex-showgirl, was supposed to be his mother and a cold-blooded murderer?

“Why’d you sleep with him, with Ciccone?”

“It was a wild time, Lexington. We were all young, flush with cash, liquor, drugs. We felt like gods. We
were
gods, in our world. Las Vegas was our oasis, our desert kingdom. And Tony was rough, sexy. He had an edge that women liked. You have his Mediterranean complexion—”

Lex shot up his hand. He didn’t want to hear that he resembled Ciccone in any way whatsoever. “One thing I still don’t understand is that you have so much to lose by telling me this. And so little to gain. Why? Why tell me at all? Maybe you’d have done me a favor keeping quiet.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think you’ll ever understand just how much I have gained, Lexington. Looking at you, right here, in front of me, in my home. My
son.
Whom I have thought about every waking day for thirty-five years. It clean broke my heart, Lexington, to hand over that small, warm bundle the day I gave birth. I have never, ever felt so proud as when I bore you into this world. The sky had never looked brighter, and I had never grasped so keenly the meaning and sense of life.” She wavered. “And I’ve never, ever felt so lonely, so hollow and empty, as when I had to place you into the hands of another woman.”

Lex scrubbed his hand hard over his brow. Crap, this was a messy tangle of love, adultery, murder, and revenge—old Las Vegas mob-style. And the only reason he’d stumbled upon this dark and dirty truth about his own past was because Harold Rothchild’s old connection with Frank Epstein had led him here.

“…there are still people in town who will go to great lengths
to ensure that the past stays where it belongs—buried. You go trying to mess with that, and you’re looking to be messing with some real bad ghosts…”

Yeah, well now he knew just how bad those ghosts really were.

“What is your illness?” he asked calmly.

“An advanced form of leukemia. When my system starts to fail, it will be very fast. And it could happen anytime. Today. Tomorrow, next week.”

Lex stared at her for several beats, then turned and exited the penthouse without looking back, his heart stone-cold numb.

His soul empty.

Mechanically, he pressed the elevator button for the lobby and began the ride back to ground level.

He finally had one answer he’d been searching a lifetime for—he knew the name of his father. And he felt more alone than ever, more at a loss as to who he really was. Because in a way, he’d just lost his mother. He’d just lost everything he thought he’d ever known.

Empty, emotionless, alone, he exited the elevator.

And there she was—Jenna—pacing agitatedly in front of the elevators, wearing an innocent summer dress with a small floral print, flat sandals, loose-flowing hair. Her eyes lit brightly when she saw him, and she ran to him.

Lex took her in his arms, wrapped himself around her. Held tight. As tight as he dared without hurting her. She was suddenly a buffer against the overwhelming emotion threatening to crack out of him, the only thing stopping him from crumbling. The only thing in this world that mattered to him right at this moment.

She looked up, eyes warm, soft and caring. “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should never have asked you to go against your job, your principles.”

He closed his eyes against a sudden sharp burn, put his head back, battling to keep it all inside. But she cupped the back of
his head, made him look at her, and she leaned up on tiptoe and kissed him.

Through her summer dress he could feel her breasts, her nipples hardening, and he felt himself implode. He had to make love to her. Right now. In Epstein’s hotel. Jenna’s mouth opened warm, soft under his. Kissing her, Lex backed toward the check-in desk. “A room,” he murmured against her lips. “We need a room.”

They started up in the elevator, his tongue tangling with hers as he slipped his hand under her dress. He lifted her bare leg, smooth as silk, hooked it around him, finding her panties damp. His heart began to race, his breath coming short. Knowing the cameras, the eye-in-the-sky was watching, he thrust his fingers inside her, began to move them. Jenna sagged against him, sinking down onto his fingers, deepening his reach as she hooked her leg higher. He felt her undoing his fly, taking his erection into her hands.

She hurriedly guided him into herself, and Lex grabbed her buttocks as she curled her other leg around his hips and they crashed back against the mirror. With near-blind passionate hunger, a desperate need to find himself, to find her, he thrust up into her. She threw her head back, hair cascading down her back as she clung her arms around his neck.