Sweet Recovery (Ex Ops Series Book 4) (18 page)

Now I could feel her body trembling through her hands. Good. Maybe she was letting everything sink the hell in this time. If I had to tattoo that shit across her forehead so she wouldn’t forget, I would.

“I can see that I’ve finally got your undivided attention, so now that I’ve told you why I’m here, how about you start explaining yourself?”

She seemed so lost. I could see the wheels spinning in her head, but no matter how many times she opened her mouth to say something, nothing came out. That was okay. I could wait until she was ready to talk.

It must have been almost ten minutes later when she finally said, “I don’t have time for this right now, Lucas. You really need to go.”

Obviously, she was out of her damn mind.

“I’m not moving an inch until you tell me what I want to know.”

She ran a shaky hand through her hair. “What do you want to know?”

Frustration surged through me, and I couldn’t help myself when I growled back at her, “How about you start with your name? Since when have you been Virginia Wellington instead of Virginia DuBois? Then you can move on to why the hell you disappeared on me for five years.”

Biting her bottom lip nervously, she took another look around the restaurant as she pulled her hands out of mine. Then she grabbed the paper napkin on the table and started tearing it into little pieces.

“Let me tell you a story, Lucas.”

“You know I don’t believe in your fairytales, Ginny.” The words, ones I had said more than once when we were younger in an attempt to keep her at arm’s length, slipped out before I could stop them. And watching the woman I wanted most in this world suffer from the careless words I had given her so many times before caused me to rage on the inside.

She flinched, almost as if I had slapped her, and the sight had me repressing the urge to put my fist through the wall.

“I’m well aware of your disbelief in fairytales, Lucas. Don’t worry; I no longer believe in them, either. Whoever coined the phrase ‘happily ever after’ was obviously delusional.”

Those softly spoken words were like a knife through my heart, but she didn’t give me time to dwell on the pain and loss I felt over the girl who had once believed in romantic fairytales with happy ever afters. No, she looked up from the mess of her torn paper napkin to pin me to the spot with her emotionally empty eyes and continued speaking.

“Unfortunately, this story is altogether true. You see, there once was a young man who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His family came from old money, and he was used to having anything his heart desired. That included the girl he was madly in love with who lived in her very own mansion across the street.”

Fuck. My gut started to churn, and suddenly, I knew what was coming before she even said it.

“Your mother.”

Nodding, she repeated, “My mother. They grew up together, ran in the same social circles, and it was always assumed they would marry one day. Not a hardship for either of them, because they were both madly in love with each other. Then, one day, he came home from college with his bachelor’s degree in hand, but found no celebration waiting for him. No, instead he found his mother in tears because his father had blown the family fortune on bad investments. They were going to lose everything that had been in his family for generations.

“This was devastating news, not just because his family stood to lose everything financially, but this also meant that the parents of the woman he loved wouldn’t allow her to marry him. And when I say he loved her, I mean unconditionally and obsessively. There was absolutely no way he’d lose his woman and his fortune.

“He was utterly enraged at what his father had done. And when the young man went to go confront him, he found his father hanging from the ceiling, dead. Suicide.

“So now, not only was his family losing everything they owned, including the roof over their heads, their fortune, and him possibly the love of his life, but he’d also lost his father. Some people might crumble under those circumstances. And some did.

“His mother was inconsolable. But a young twenty-four-year-old Richard did not. No, he decided that he refused to lose his wealthy status or comfortable lifestyle. Nor would he give up his sweetheart, especially to his father’s mistakes. He knew there were ways for him to quickly make some money before they lost everything. He’d met some interesting people while he was off at college, people who dealt in illegal things, you see.”

My poor Ginny. It wasn’t like the Ginny I knew to tell stories about men hanging themselves and guys interested in illegal things. She had always created stories about princesses waiting for their Prince Charmings with her art. The shit she was dishing out now sounded like it had come from some made for TV movie gone wrong.

Knowing it was real, but needing to say it, I told her, “Babe, this isn’t like any of the other stories you’ve told me before. Sort of somber and shit.”

Looking at the rest of the room quickly, she waved my comment away with her dainty, little hand and kept going. “I’m almost done. I don’t have much time left, anyway.

“So, this young man cashes in his trust fund, which was all that was left of the family fortune because his father couldn’t get his hands on it, and goes back to some of the seedier people he met in college and asks them for the names of their suppliers. Once he had their suppliers’ names, he somehow convinced those suppliers to let him invest in their businesses. If he invested, they could expand their operations, and he would get a significant cut of the product. His ploy worked.

“In the span of a month, this young man had invested half of the considerable trust fund his grandfather had left him into different aspects of the drug trade. Within a year, he was one of the biggest investors in the drug trade in Chicago.

“He took a small break to talk my mother into marriage, and it wasn’t long before her family cut ties with her after rumors started circulating about how my father made his money. After a while, though, he became scared my mother might leave him, so he threw out her birth control and purposely got her pregnant. Any and every tie he could make between the two of them, you know?”

I tried to ask her if she was close to her father, but she shook her head, cutting me off, and kept on with her story, almost as if she was now anxious to get it all out.

“Within ten years, he killed off many of the people he once had shared the business with and was now supplying half of the drugs being sold in a couple of states. Not only did this man salvage his family’s existing wealth, but he also expanded it significantly. He became one of the most powerful men in the Midwest, and somehow, no matter how hard the Feds or DEA tried, they couldn’t prosecute him.

“One might say Richard Wellington felt like he was on top of the world. Perhaps that’s why he became an alcoholic and started slapping my mother around. To be honest, I’ve never asked him why, and I never will, because the hard truth of the matter is, it doesn’t matter what his reasons were. What mattered was that he had raised his fist to her in anger at all. My mother feared for our safety, so she took me and ran.

“While I don’t know everything that happened, I do remember enough to know it was bad. Very bad. Bad enough that my mom felt the need to run away from where she’d grown up in the Midwest and hide out in a relatively no-name New York town under a false name to keep both of us safe from him.”

Reaching across the table, I grabbed one of her hands with my own and rubbed my thumb over the back of her soft skin. “So she was never a widower like she told everyone? You two were hiding? But why didn’t you ever tell us, Gin?”

Shaking her head, she explained, “My mother loved your family as if they were her own, but she said we couldn’t trust our secrets with anyone, because it would put them in danger. Neither one of us ever wanted to put your family in danger, Lucas. We both loved all of you too much for that.”

A rush of frustration and anger washed over me, and I leaned over to growl, “Are you fucking kidding me here? I was a goddamn Green Beret, and you didn’t think you could come to me with this shit?”

Her eyes implored me to understand. I could read between the lines to what she wouldn’t say. She loved me too much to endanger me. Gin and her mom had probably also assumed, after that many years, they were safe from danger. She wouldn’t say the words to me, though, and I wished she would. I wished she would tell me like she had five and a half years ago at her damn birthday party, because this time, my answer would be different. I had been a fucking idiot then, believing she would be better off without me. Now I knew she needed me more than ever.

This time, I could give her the words that I couldn’t give her before.

“What does this have to do with you up and disappearing on my family by telling them you were moving out of state for a job and then cutting them out of your life? I get you not wanting to talk to me, but you shut Olivia out of all people. Your best friend. That shit does not add up.”

She leaned forward, and I did the same so that I was hunched over the table to be closer to her. Our faces were only a few inches apart when she finally whispered, “He found us, Lucas. Twenty years in, he now supplies most of the Midwest.”

Jesus. I had known I wasn’t going to like the end of this fucking story.

“You can’t get away from him?”

She shook her head as she whispered, “I won’t leave my mother.”

“And she won’t leave him again?”

Shrugging, she said, “Mom said it was hard to get away from him before; it’s impossible now. Richard Wellington would search to the ends of the earth for her.”

As she shook her head again, I knew without a doubt that she had been with that monster for over five years now, and I hadn’t even known she was in trouble. I had just thought she had gotten a job to be away from me when, instead, my girl had been suffering at the hands of her father. I was so mad at myself I couldn’t see straight. I should have known something was wrong when she had disappeared off the grid and I couldn’t find her no matter what avenue I had tried. No one disappeared that cleanly unless someone wanted them to. Instead of thinking logically, though, I had let my bruised pride and broken heart take over, wallowing in my own self-pity. Ridiculous.

I had to get Ginny somewhere safe and secure until I could figure out a way to get her out from under her father’s thumb forever, keeping everyone safe in the process.

“I’m going to get you out of here, babe.”

She was shaking her head, but I ignored her as I stood up and pulled her out of her chair.

“None of your lip, Gin, or I swear to God I’m going to put you over my knee and paddle your ass.”

She started to say something, but in the blink of an eye, she was ripped away from me, and I felt the loss of her warm hand in my own as if someone had ripped my own damn arm off. I had reached up to grab her back to me when I came face to face with a darkly tanned man who looked to be of Hindu descent, wearing what looked to be a custom tailored suit flanked by two other men and Ginny shoved behind all three of them.

I couldn’t believe I had been so focused on Ginny that I had not heard the men approaching us from behind until it was too late. That wasn’t like me at all. I had been trained better than that.

Trying to reign in my anger before I did something rash, like started beating the shit out of these three fuckheads and taking the risk of Ginny accidentally getting hurt in the process, I spit out through clench teeth, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, man, but you need to give me my girl back before I snap your neck like a goddamn toothpick.”

The man in the suit smiled, and for some odd reason, it reminded me of what a shark looked like right before it attacked.

“Your girl?” he murmured. His brown eyes bore into my own before he tilted his head back and laughed loudly. Then he looked back at me with a smile so big and smug that I wanted to reach out and punch his lights out. However, I stopped, seeing Ginny looking at me with pleading eyes as she stood behind him, begging me not to.

I knew who this was now—her fiancé. The man who had a record just a little too clean. A little too vague. The man I would end if I had to in order to get my woman back.

Sanjay Kahn.

Chapter

14

Ginny

It was strange. One moment, I was confronting my past, and the next, my future was shoving me away from him. Okay, so maybe that was a bit philosophical or whatever, but that was exactly what happened. I went from Lucas threatening to paddle my ass and promising to get me out of there to Jay and his two bodyguards blocking my view of even seeing Lucas, protecting me from what they thought was a threat.

My head was spinning, not entirely from the cosmopolitan, and I tried frantically to stop my building panic so I could figure out how to get Jay and his men out of here before they hurt Lucas. That was about the time I clued in to their conversation.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, man, but you need to give me my girl back before I snap your neck like a goddamn toothpick,” Lucas ordered Jay.

Could this possibly get any worse?

“Your girl?” Jay murmured back in a voice that seemed more than a little too calm for the man I had learned he could be.

Suddenly, Jay threw his head back and started laughing.

Dropping my face into my hands, I knew my answer to my stupidly thought question a few seconds ago. Yes, this situation could absolutely get worse. It just had. In fact, I was pretty sure I was in hell, a horrible, horrible soap opera type of hell that just wouldn’t end.

I had to think fast if I was going to get Jay and myself out of here without there being any bloodshed. There was no way I had come this far, sacrificed this much, for Lucas to come barging in, thinking he was going to save the day, only to get himself killed.

Of course, at the moment, I was so mad at him that, if I had a gun in my hand, I just might have shot him myself.

Grabbing the back hem of Jay’s suit jacket, I gave it a gentle tug to get his attention. Then, leaning closer to his back, I whispered, “Jay, can we please just leave. We’re causing a scene, and I really don’t want to see how my father would react if news of this got back to him.”