The Trouble with Temptation (7 page)

They were trophies and marks of stature.

Nothing else.

Just then, the very walls with the stunning and carefully chosen pieces of art felt like they were closing in around him, threatening to choke him.

He paced the gleaming hardwood floors, going from hardwood to designer rug and back, his Italian leather shoes striking down with—
click, click, click, click, thud, thud, click, click, thud, thud—repeat.

He’d been pacing for nearly twenty minutes and he had yet to come up with any sort of solution, had yet to burn off the nerves and fear jumbling inside him.

His wife was on her way to a dinner party, sulking because he’d canceled at the last minute, claiming a work emergency.

He wasn’t lying, either.

This was an emergency and he could think of a thousand ways to tie it into his job.

He wanted to hit something.

Hurt somebody. But the source of his rage was already dead.

Shayla Hardee was dead, and with her, his problems should have died. Sadly, he couldn’t count on that as a certainty.

The one remaining complication was Hannah Parker. Why had she been in Shayla’s car? What had happened? Did she
know
something? Had she been some sort of partner with Shayla?

He smoothed a shaking hand down his tie and fought the urge to go to the phone. A few carefully placed phone calls could get him some of the answers he needed. But those phone calls could be tracked. And if anybody realized he was asking questions …

No.

It was better to just
be careful
.

What little Shayla had on him wasn’t much, paltry in comparison some of the dirt she had on others—and he knew that for a fact, because in order to get her off his back, he’d given her that dirt.

But he needed
information
.

The entire world turned on information and he’d made it this far by dealing in it. People only
thought
they knew how he’d pulled himself up out of the gutter and gone on to establish himself as a presence—as a
force
in this part of the state.

He hadn’t lucked into his position, either, being born into it the way the McKay family had. That had been one thing he’d worked damn hard on, trying to dig up information on them, but unless numerous speeding tickets or frequent business trips out of the country were really fascinating, there wasn’t much to be said about them.

They might as well be a family of saints. They donated to charity, they paid their taxes. Fucking McKays. They owned half that town, bits and pieces of the state, and had their fingers in all sorts of different pies. Of course, it all looked nice and legal, but could
anybody
be that clean?

He didn’t think so. Not that he could prove it.

But they weren’t the problem. Shayla Hardee was the problem.

A dead one, he reminded himself.

It would be fine. Everything would work out.

For the first time since he’d heard, he felt some of the tension drain away.

He’d been struggling with the problem of Shayla Hardee for too long and now she was gone. Now all the senator had to worry about was Hannah Parker and whether or not
she
knew anything.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Home sweet home.”

Hannah gave Griffin a wan smile.

He was the one person she could completely relax around. She had real memories of him.

They were old and distant, murky even, like she was looking at them through a film or a veil, but they were real and solid.

He been one of her first visitors, and next to Brannon, he was the one at her side the most while she was in the hospital.

One thing had become crystal clear during those days and it hadn’t been her memories.

The two men didn’t like each other.

Hannah was too tired to deal with it and she hadn’t wanted to put up with the testosterone overload, either. Both of them had been in the room as the nurse went over discharge instructions and she’d braced herself for the argument to come when she was asked who’d be taking her home.

It had come as a surprise when Brannon had ended up coming to her side and brushing a kiss against her brow. “How about I bring you lunch? I can keep you company for a while.”

She didn’t know who had been more surprised—her or Griffin.

But she’d appreciated it.

So Griffin had brought her home, although Brannon had stayed with her right up until he shut the car door, pausing just long enough to brush his fingers down her cheek.

Now she stood in the middle of her apartment and tried to remember
something
. Drawn to the small balcony, she moved outside, her gaze straying to one of the buildings across the street. Images rolled through her mind and she could see herself sitting out here. “I liked this spot, didn’t I?”

She looked over just in time to see Griffin shrug. “Yeah, I think so.” He crooked up a brow at her.

She had another flash—a man, his face not too dissimilar from Griffin’s, but older, more lined. More tired.

“You read out here a lot,” Griffin continued, unaware of her distraction.

“Do you look like my dad?” she asked softly.

He came up short, the question catching him by surprise. Rocking back on his heels, he tucked his hands into his pockets and studied her for a minute. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do. He looked a lot like my dad, I know that, and my mom always told me I was the spitting image of him.”

“They…” She hesitated, almost afraid to ask. “What happened? I mean, they’re both gone, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.” Griffin looked away. “They’re both gone. They died the same day. It was … they were out in the gulf. Had taken the day to go do some deep-sea fishing. Came across a stranded vessel.” He paused, looking back at her. “None of this is ringing a bell, is it?”

“No.” She flipped at the latch and slipped outside into the heat of the day. Griffin followed. “If you don’t want to talk about it…”

“It’s fine. It was a long time ago. Your dad … well, you should know what happened.” Hannah sat while he leaned against the railing, his gaze on his feet. “It’s been almost twenty years. We were both in third grade. I lived over in Baton Rouge with Mama. You lived here … we saw each other a couple times a month. Our dads, they were close. It didn’t surprise me, really. I mean, not now.”

He lifted his face up to the sky. “They were good people, both of them. I requested a copy of the report, when I was older. It’s why I became a cop. The FBI never solved it.”

“FBI?” Her heart lurched to a slow, grinding halt.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “It happened out on open waters, in the gulf. The Coast Guard was the first to respond, but they don’t handle investigations or anything. The FBI did all that.”

He turned away and braced his hands on the railing, the muscles in his back tense. “Not like they had a lot to go on—dead ends everywhere from what I could tell. Only one person to question, unless they missed a shark or two.”

The grim stab at humor didn’t do anything to lighten to mood.

After a moment, he looked back at her and the expression on his face was bleak. “That stranded vessel—investigating officers were pretty sure it wasn’t stranded at all. The most concrete info they had was from my dad’s call to the Coast Guard. When they saw the boat, my dad put in a call for assistance—according to that information, he said he thought somebody had been hurt. He saw somebody lying, half over the railing, blood dripping into the water. There were sharks circling. That was what caught their attention. Our dads thought maybe they’d gotten into a fight with some drug runners or something … and they stopped to help.”

Hannah felt cold.

Griffin lapsed into another bout of silence, his eyes seeing something off in the distance. She was seeing something, too. That flicker of a man’s face—the one who looked like Griffin—it was solidifying, becoming more than a flicker now. Almost a memory and she had flashes of him smiling down at her. Music playing—
Brown Eyed Girl
—and they were dancing.

“The FBI agent I talked to, he’s retired now, but he suspects the guys were dealers. The deal went south and then our dads showed up—they were dead from the moment that other vessel saw them,” Griffin said. One hand clenched into a fist, while his eyes turned hard and flat. “There was only one guy alive at the end of it all and he wasn’t about to come clean.”

Griffin skimmed a hand back over his short hair, his expression grim. “That’s probably the only reason we even know anything at all about what happened. The Coast Guard was pretty close—got there fast. Your dad … Uncle Sean held on for a few minutes, but they couldn’t save him.”

Hannah buried her face in her hands. Then, while the grief dug holes into her heart, she pushed upright and moved to the wrought-iron railing. “And they don’t know what happened?”

“They know the basics. There were two people on board—well, two people and a corpse. One of the guys shot our dads—yours first, then mine. They were pulling up alongside the other boat when it happened. My father was soaking wet according to the report. They speculated that he saw enough of what was happening to know there was trouble, so he dove into the water. Stupid bastard—there were sharks in the water, but if your dad was in trouble … anyway, he swam around and came up behind, grabbed one of them as they came aboard Uncle Sean’s boat. Most likely, my dad hamstringed him with the knife, but the other guy shot him. The Coast Guard was right on top of them by that time, but my dad was already dead. The stupid fucks tried to shoot it out with the Coast Guard, but that didn’t go over well. One guy died right away, the other surrendered, was taken in for questioning, but he was killed in jail within a week. All that much more reason to think it was drug-related.”

Hannah closed her eyes and wrapped her hands around the metal railing. Too much. It was all too much to process.

She couldn’t think about a man she barely remembered lying dead on the deck of a boat.

All because he and his brother tried to help some strangers.

She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to pull up some memory of him.

You’re my … brown eyed girl. Do you remember when … we used to say.…

That bit of song spun around and around in her head and she sucked in a breath, grabbing at her skull as though it was going to fly apart. One sliver, one tiny fraction fell free.

A woman.

Hannah gasped.

Mom
.

Smiling.

Her round face—
Hannah’s
face—smiling at her from across a darkened yard, lit by the smile and the dancing flames of a fire. She was watching them, Hannah realized.

Watching Hannah dancing with her dad.

“We were happy.” Slowly, she looked up at Griffin. “Mama, Daddy and me. We were happy, weren’t we? Before he died?”

He pushed off the railing and knelt down in front of her. “Yeah,” he said, a smile crooking up the corners of his mouth. He caught her hand and squeezed. “You were. All of us were. Mom … she … um, well. She tried to get you and your mama to move to Baton Rouge and stay with us, but Aunt Lily didn’t want to leave Treasure. Said she’d grown up here, wanted you to grow up here. Didn’t want to leave the house that she and your dad had bought.”

Hannah nodded and then looked away, tucking that scrap of memory away. She’d write it down, she decided. These bits and pieces that were
real
, that were solid, she’d buy a journal and write
everything
down. Sooner or later, she’d have enough to believe that she really did have a life—something more than the Swiss cheese experiment that was her brain these days.

But that one, bittersweet memory of her mother led to another one.

One of her mother crying.
Begging
.

“She was happy.
Here
.” She looked back at the apartment where she lived but shook her head. “Not in this apartment, I know that. I didn’t grow up here. I don’t know where that place is, or what it looks like, but it was here. But instead of moving to Baton Rouge, she let that miserable fuck move in and knock her around for the rest of her life instead,” Hannah said, frustration bubbling inside her.

“You remember him.”

“Some.” She managed not to flinch at one particularly clear memory. She didn’t want to think about that, or the guilt. Rage threatened to steal the air from her lungs and she sucked in a deep breath. “His name. What was his name, Griffin?”

“Omar.” Griffin’s lip curled as he said it, as though the very mention of the man left a bad taste in his mouth. “Omar Lovett.”

“Omar.” She clenched both of her hands into fists and wished she had something in front of her that she could hit. “I remember his face. He was this big, ugly, lazy pig of a man. I wasn’t a skinny girl, I know that, but he would sit there at the table, stuffing his face and then he’d take half the food my mother gave me and throw it away, telling me that I was too fat already and I had to quit being such a lazy pig—he sure as hell wasn’t going to let me hang around his house forever.”

A low noise escaped Griffin, but she didn’t look at him. “It was
our
house, mine and Mama’s. Insurance … I can remember that. Mama paid it all off with my dad’s life insurance policy, put some in the bank for me for college.”

It was weird the way those memories were just there, as if all she had to do was reach for them.

“I remember him hurting her—I can’t remember all of it, but there are these … flashes.” She waved a hand back and forth in front of her head. She reached for another memory but there was nothing else.

“What else do you remember?”

She laughed sourly and glanced over at him. “It would be better to explain what I
don’t
remember. Almost everything is vague impressions. Him hurting my mom, but I don’t remember her name.” Her voice broke and she had to press a hand to her mouth to keep from sobbing. “Griffin…”

He caught her in a tight embrace. “Lily. Your mama’s name was Lily.”

“Lily.” She clung tight to her cousin and tried not to cry.