Secrets and Sins: Raphael: A Secrets and Sins novel (Entangled Ignite) (5 page)

“Noah, what’s—”

She gasped. Cried out.

Her car. A dense web of cracks and lines spun out from jagged holes in her windshield and the driver’s side window. Several shards of glass clung to the frame like diamond teardrops. The violence in the shattered windows seemed to vibrate in the morning air, staining the pretty day with its ugliness.

Who would—?

But even as the question formed in her head, she answered it.

She didn’t know a name. Or a face. Still, she knew with a certainty who had committed the cruel act.

She edged toward the car.

“Greer, wait. I don’t think…”

She didn’t heed his warning. Moments later she wished she had.

Fear—stark, heavy, and malicious—knocked her back from the car several steps. The horror tunneled into her chest, invaded her body until she breathed the oily, putrid stink of terror. Another cry ripped past her lips. She closed her eyes, sinking to the ground, heedless of the cold sidewalk.

Yet the image remained in her brain like a parasite she couldn’t purge.

A letter-sized envelope sat on the driver’s seat. The plain white color, her name in block letters on the outside, no return address—most likely containing the same vicious insults and accusations as the others she’d received over the months.

But the doll…

The doll with the eyes gouged out, lips blackened, and soft body torn apart…

That was new.

Chapter Six

On Raphael Marcel’s fourteenth birthday, his Uncle Salvatore had pulled him outside on his aunt’s front porch and passed along two pieces of sage advice.

One: Never become involved with a girl or woman with bigger tits than brains. Perky knockers were temporary; good conversation was forever.

Two: Always wear your jimmy hat. Or else you’ll become chained for life to a woman with more tits than brains.

Since he intimately remembered the small but perfect handful of Greer Addison’s breasts with HD clarity, he could state with definite certainty that her intelligence exceeded her bust size. But according to the words she’d just uttered, it appeared he had somehow slipped up with Salvatore’s second pearl of wisdom.

Again.

“What did you just say?” he rasped, hoping against desperate hope that maybe he’d heard wrong or gone spontaneously deaf.

“I’m pregnant.”

Nope. His hearing was perfect. And he was fucked.

Anger. Hurt. Bitterness. Damnable hope. It all converged on him at once. In seconds he was transported back to his old apartment seven years earlier opening a manila envelope and a wound in his heart that had never fully healed. A wound that was being ripped open all over again by Greer Addison.

His fingers curled into the arms of his office chair, and his feet were glued to the floor beneath his desk. Something. He should do something, say something. Kick something. But nope. It appeared that remaining planted on his ass was all he could manage as he blinked at Greer like a damn owl. Greer—still lovely, still composed, still all lady-of-the-manor-ish.

And apparently very knocked up.

As if her showing up in his office at Liberty Security Services, the security and information systems firm he owned with one of his best friends, Chayot Grey, wasn’t shocking enough. It’d been almost four months since he’d last seen her in the police station. The familiar flicker of anger kindled to life in his gut and chest.
Shit
. He hated that just the memory of her rejection still retained the power to make him angry. Hated that just recalling her aversion caused the ghostly fingers of shame and unworthiness to scratch down his spine. Hated that he’d allowed another pampered socialite to make him feel like shit beneath her expensive shoe.

Hell yeah, he was angry—angry, not hurt. Hurt feelings were for pussies…damn it.

And yet, even after she’d avoided his touch as though he’d contracted the clap, he’d tried to contact her. To say what, he’d had no idea.
How’s it going? Are you okay? What the hell?

All of those opening lines had sounded stupid and lame even in his own head. But he’d still located her cell phone number off the consultation information sheet she and her ex had completed when they’d visited the office back in December, and he’d called. She hadn’t answered. So he’d called her parents’ home only to be informed she no longer lived there. He’d even phoned her brother’s office and was turned away again. At that point, he’d realized she probably didn’t want to be contacted. Especially by him, since what was supposed to have been a discreet one-night stand had become part of an official police report…and leaked to the press.
Socialite’s Scandalous Sleepover Is Alibi for Murder!
That had been one of the more creative headlines slung across one of those shitty tabloids. He figured he wouldn’t see or hear from her again.

Until she strolled into his office bringing the news of his supposedly impending fatherhood.

A band constricted his chest, steadily squeezing tighter and tighter. He’d been here—a woman announcing he was going to be a father—before. And it was like a bad sitcom rerun. Or a jacked-up case of déjà vu. Except this time he knew how it ended. In lies, betrayal, and heartbreak. In debilitating grief and loss.

Well, no fucking way. Turning the channel.

God, Mondays sucked.

“Since you’re telling me this, I assume I’m the nominee for the father.”
Maury Povich, where the hell are you?
He half expected the talk show host to appear in his office. His grasp on the chair’s arms tightened until his fingers could’ve been talons.

Greer didn’t reply immediately. Instead, she nodded, but not before something flashed in her eyes. The—whatever it was—was there and gone before he could analyze its presence, but a hollowed-out crater took up residence in his chest. For some reason he felt as if he’d just kicked her dog or stolen her Gucci purse.
Asshole
. He’d pretty much just insinuated she slept around.

Memories of their night together in the backseat of his SUV still haunted him like Casper the Nymphomaniac Ghost. With crystal-clear, slightly obsessive clarity, he remembered the fresh apple scent of her hair, the silken softness of her skin, the not-quite-a-handful perfection of her breasts, and the wet, shrink-wrap fit of her sex. Goddamn, she’d been tight as a fist. Sweat prickled on his palms just thinking about it. Getting into her that first time had been slow going. And hot as hell.

She’d been engaged, and he wasn’t the village idiot, so sex with her fiancé was pretty much a given. But either dearly departed Gavin had possessed a dick the size of a cocktail wiener or he and Greer hadn’t been tearing up the sheets on a regular basis. Probably both. Guys like the son of a bitch who’d been her fiancé usually wrapped themselves in arrogance and self-entitlement to compensate for lack of other things—confidence, personality, class, penis.

Still didn’t mean he was the father of her baby. They’d had sex once—well, technically three times—but she’d been lovers with Gavin for years. He would have to be the world’s biggest hypocrite to point fingers at her or call her a whore for being confused about the dates and which man could’ve fathered her child. But the odds… He didn’t sit in judgment over her, but he damn sure wasn’t going through this You-My-Baby-Daddy circus again either. Nope, sorry. Been there, done that. Bought—and burned—the T-shirt.

“Sit,” he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Please,” he added, envisioning his mother, Sharon Marcel, smacking him on the back of the head over his lack of manners.

“Thank you,” she murmured, and lowered to the visitor chair in front of his desk. She didn’t say anything, just stared at the top of his desk as if it were a crystal ball. Hell, if it were, he would be perched over, trying to figure out when his life had taken a turn from Pretty Normal, USA, to Baby Daddy-ville. “I’m sorry about showing up unannounced. I didn’t think this was something I could tell you over the phone. I know it’s…surprising.”

“The Cubs winning the World Series is surprising. Elvis buying coffee at the local 7-Eleven is surprising. You being pregnant is somewhere between a Beatles reunion tour and Mariah Carey winning an Academy Award for
Glitter
.” He leaned forward and propped his forearms on the desk. “I used protection, Greer.”

Her full, bare lips thinned into a straight line.
She isn’t wearing lipstick or gloss.
Why that thought hit him so hard, he couldn’t explain, but it struck him as odd. And out of place.

“Nothing is foolproof. Accidents happen.”

“I’m not trying to offend you, but you and Gavin…” He couldn’t bring himself to complete the question. Not because he was squeamish or even particularly sensitive. But putting her, Gavin, and sex in the same sentence… It incited an inexplicable urge to punch a hole in the wall. “Since you were with him for a while, it seems more likely he would be the father than me.”

Before he finished speaking, she was shaking her head. “No, not possible. We hadn’t…been together for six months before you and I—” She faltered, a faint blush rising to stain her elegant cheekbones.

He remained silent, waiting—eager—to hear how she would describe their night together. Fucking? Screwing? Making love? The die-hard bachelor in him shied away from the last phrase like a skittish horse.

“Anyway, it’s why I wasn’t on birth control,” she continued, abandoning the line of thought. Disappointment arrowed through him. “I’d stopped taking it after we decided to be celibate in the months before our marriage, and since we planned on starting a family right away.”

Well, she got the “family right away” part, didn’t— Whoa. Wait.
What?
“Hold on a second. Are you trying to tell me you two had an
agreement
to be celibate? He actually said
yes
to no sex with you?”

The tint in her face deepened, but her chin rose a notch, her green eyes containing a hard challenge. “Yes.”

He stared at her, dumbfounded. The bark of laughter escaped him before he had a chance to contain it and boomed in the office like a crack of thunder. What the hell was she playing at? Did she actually expect him to believe Gavin had had her at the ready, and he
chose
not to have her under him? Unless she’d caught the motherfucker cheating with a woman with a huge Adam’s apple, there was no way in
hell
he was buying what she was laying down.

He loosed another disbelieving hoot.

“Are you kidding me?” Taking her stony silence as affirmation, he snickered, shaking his head. “If I did believe your story—which, frankly, I’m having a hard time buying—then you should be delighted there’s a chance the baby’s mine. Otherwise the kid you’re carrying might have half that ass’s DNA. God knows we wouldn’t want
that
gene pool to continue.”

“It’s not kind or appropriate to speak ill of the dead,” she snapped.

He snorted. “If you wanted manners, you should’ve fucked Emily Post.”

“Raphael,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

The weariness in her voice snagged his attention first. Then he looked at her—really
looked
at her. The faint shadows under her eyes. The patrician bone structure that seemed slightly sharper then he remembered, as if she’d recently lost weight. The fine tremor in the hand that squeezed her forehead. She seemed tired. No, exhausted. The baby? That could be it, but he had two older sisters and four nephews—had been there through a pregnancy himself. He recognized prenatal fatigue. This was something else.

Uneasiness and alarm almost propelled him from his seat and around the desk. A part of him wanted to sink into the chair next to hers, lift her hand in his, and assure her that whatever was wrong, he’d fix it. But he didn’t; he remained behind his desk. They weren’t friends. Hell, they were barely acquaintances. Onetime lovers—that’s it. And a screw in the backseat didn’t add up to a connection. She didn’t need comfort from him. Didn’t want it. She’d made that abundantly clear in the police station when she’d nearly leaped on top of that detective to avoid his touch.

No, she just wanted to pin a baby on him.

If he were a woman, he might’ve called the twinge in his chest hurt or anger. But since he wasn’t, he chalked it up to indigestion from the Reuben sandwich he’d had at lunch.

“What’s wrong?” He braced his elbows on the arms of his chair. And when she lifted her lashes and met his gaze, he clutched the armrests, hoping she didn’t notice how he strangled the hard plastic. Even with the obvious signs of strain, her beauty stole his breath away. Made his body tighten. His cock pulsed in hunger. Apparently his dick didn’t give a damn that she didn’t want him. Or that she was trying to run the same okeydokey another pampered socialite had played on him at another time.

Nope. All his johnson cared about was her thick chocolate hair that was drawn back into a ponytail. How the rich tone emphasized and enhanced the emerald green of her eyes. Eyes that reminded him of the one and only time he’d visited the gorgeous New Hampshire lake region when his older sister got married there five years ago. Throw in the delicate bone structure she could probably date back to some English noble ancestor and the Angelina Jolie mouth, and Greer Addison almost made him forget why imagining her half naked and orgasming on his lap was a bad idea.

Almost.

“I…” She paused, nervously wet her lips, and he found himself fascinated by the damp bottom curve. Wanted to glide his thumb over the naked skin and discover if it was as soft as he remembered.
Focus, damn it
. She’d come to his office for a reason, and it wasn’t for a repeat performance of the night they’d spent together. If that was the case, she could’ve contacted him before now. No, Greer had a purpose—other than informing him of his supposed fatherhood.

“You, what?” he prompted, hardening his voice.

“I need your help.” An audible breath shuddered from between her lips, and he could almost see her gathering her nerve to continue. “A couple of weeks after Gavin…died I started receiving letters.”

He frowned. “What kind of letters?”

“Harassing. Things like ‘whore,’ ‘rich bitch,’ telling me I won’t get away with murder or I can’t escape justice.”

Ice crept through his veins. “How often?”

“There were only a couple until about a month after Gavin died, and the police decided I was no longer their prime suspect, merely a person of interest.” A humorless smile ghosted across her lips. “After that, the letters started arriving once a week, sometimes twice. All with the same messages.”

“You’ve been cleared?”

He, along with the greater Boston area, had caught the media coverage of Gavin Wells’s murder. Within hours of his death, the coverage had resembled a shark feeding frenzy with Greer as the chum thrown in the middle of the melee. Rafe had immediately gone to the cops and given his statement about being with her from about eight thirty when he’d approached her in the bar until well after 2:00 a.m., when he’d dropped her off at her apartment building. Since news of her arrest had never broken, he’d figured the time of death had fallen somewhere in the hours she’d been with him.

“Cleared?” Again that non-smile. “I wouldn’t go that far. I think I’m just a bit less guilty than I first appeared. Other than the knife in my hand, they couldn’t find any trace evidence on me. No blood on me—his or mine. The knot on the back of my head that I could have inflicted only if I’d suddenly became a contortionist.” She shrugged, a faint frown darkening her brow before she focused on him again. “And then, of course, the time of death. The medical examiner recorded it as between nine thirty and twelve thirty. You confirmed my alibi. Thank you,” she murmured. “I meant to…well, just thank you.”