Love by Association Read online

  While it was true that Leslie Morrison had refused police access to her son, Chantel wasn’t as certain as Wayne that the woman wouldn’t stand up for him. She believed it was more a case of the woman keeping her son safe by covering for her husband—and taking his abuse herself.

  Reagan shook his head, picking up his folder. “So, she won’t press charges against the bastard.”

  The statement hung there between the three of them. Questions choking them with their lack of answers.

  Until it became clear that the only way any of them were going to find the peace they sought was by getting back to work.

  “You be careful out there,” Reagan said to Chantel as she walked down the hall of the station like she’d been born in fashionable heels. She’d been practicing in her apartment all week.

  “I will, sir.”

  “This man, if he’s guilty of all that we suspect—he’s dangerous.”

  “I know, sir. Which is why we need a cop in there keeping an eye on things. Don’t worry. I’ll have my gun with me at all times.”

  He nodded as he left them. Then it was just her and Wayne, standing by the back door.

  “You got me on speed dial?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Then go get them, Chantel. You’re born to do this job. If anyone can pull it off, you can.”

  She hoped so.

  Going against bad guys didn’t give her pause. Drug dealers. Thieves. Rapists. She was trained to take them down.

  But act all girlie and glamorous? A woman who could laugh in all the right places and move like she wanted every man in the place to look at her?

  That wasn’t her style at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “COME, ON, JULES, you know how much I hate going to these things by myself.” Thirty-one-year-old Colin Fairbanks stood outside his twenty-seven-year-old sister’s suite on the north end of the estate home they shared, talking to her through the door she’d just refused to open.

  “Not tonight, Col.” Her voice was strong. Determined.

  She wasn’t crying, didn’t sound damaged...tonight. Still...

  Her door opened, and she stood, looking beautiful and...normal, in jeans and a sweater that matched the blue in her eyes. “I’m in the middle of a project,” she told him.

  He could see the artist’s lamp lit over the table, the stool that she’d obviously been perched on. Paper and pencils were spread across the tilted surface.

  A project. Writing and illustrating children’s stories that she wouldn’t send out to agents or publishers. The collection was building. Colin had had a friend of his print some up for her to see—thinking that if she saw them as real books she’d be driven to find a publisher.

  “I asked you two weeks ago to accompany me tonight,” he told her. “You know way more about art than I do. And...”

  “I told you I would think about it. I never said I’d go.”

  In ten years’ time he’d managed to cajole, beg and probably guilt her into attending a handful of functions with him. Ten years of her life she’d never get back.

  “Come on, Jules. A few hours out of your Thursday night is all I’m asking.” The law firm of Fairbanks and Fairbanks—named for his father and grandfather, both deceased—represented a good many of the contributors who would be attending this evening. It was expected that a Fairbanks be there.

  He’d probably be instrumental in the closing of more than one deal that night. Which was fine with him. He liked the challenge afforded him by his job as sole owner of Santa Raquel’s most powerful law firm.

  “I know you want me to think you need me there because of the art.” Julie nodded. “But you and I both know you’re just there for the legal contract part, Colin, not the value designation. We also both know you don’t have to go alone. Just put out the word that you want a date and you’ll have your pick.”

  Her smile was almost reminiscent of the loving scoundrel Julie had been until her senior year of high school. But not quite. That shadow of perpetual resignation ruined the effect.

  “And if I go alone, I’m going to spend what parts of the evening I’m not overseeing potential negotiations fending off whatever women manage to get to me first.”

  Her eyes shone with sympathy, and a hint of the old mischief.

  “Amber Winslow’s going to be there,” he told her. The woman—a classmate of his from the private high school they’d both attended—was a leech. And newly divorced.

  In the olden days Julie would have been all over protecting him from that particular worm.

  “So are the Smyths.”

  He hadn’t heard, or he wouldn’t have asked Julie to accompany him. He was surprised actually. Smyth wasn’t a big supporter of the arts.

  But that was that. As desperately as Colin wished his little sister could move on, he also understood why she couldn’t. In the ten years since David Smyth had gotten away with brutally raping her at a party, Julie had not seen him. Even from a distance. She’d refused to be anywhere that either David Jr. or his father, David Sr.—owner of one of the last family banks in the state—were in attendance.

  In spite of the fact that that meant she was cut off from much of the social circle in which she’d grown up and thrived.

  Not to mention losing the close relationship she’d had with Margaret Smyth, David Jr.’s mother.

  With David Sr. being their father Michael’s closest friend, they’d all grown up together. When Colin and Julie’s mother had died, Margaret Smyth had been like a mother to them...

  “Jaime told me they were on the confirmed guest list.”

  Julie’s friend from grade school who’d moved to New York before high school, Jaime Mendonthol, had a couple of paintings in the evening’s fundraising auction. She was in town, and the two women had met for lunch the day before.

  Jaime had been the reason Colin had been so hopeful that his sister would agree to the night out. Missing Jaime’s local show would be hard on her.

  “I knew, anyway. Leslie Morrison sent me the guest list.”

  Leslie Morrison, wife of James Morrison, owner and CEO of Morrison Textiles—a third-generation company that had been using Fairbanks and Fairbanks as lead counsel for more than seventy-five years—was, as far as Colin knew, the only person in their circle who knew what had happened to Julie the night that David Smyth slipped a drug into her drink and then proceeded to sexually violate her in every way possible.

  Most people knew of, or had heard rumor of, a liaison gone bad between the two of them. But word among “friends” was that their sexual relations the night of the party had been consensual.

  “Friends” including Santa Raquel’s esteemed police commissioner.

  When it had become clear that Julie wasn’t going to get justice—due in large part to a law enforcement system that was willing to look away if the right money was involved—she’d begged Colin to keep the incident a secret. To preserve as much of the life she’d led as she could. He’d wanted to move, leave the country, even. Start over in Italy or someplace else beautiful enough to distract his little sister from the horror she wasn’t ever going to completely escape.

  Julie was the one who’d convinced him they needed to stay home. Pointing out, rightly so, that a lot of people depended on Fairbanks and Fairbanks, trusted them, in a world where having an attorney in business was an absolute must. Pointing out, as well, that if he closed the firm, they’d not only put a couple dozen attorneys and more than a hundred support staff out of jobs, but they’d lose the income necessary to keep their family home on the California coast—a home their grandfather had built from scratch.

  Why Leslie Morrison kept the secret, Colin didn’t know. Nor did he know, for sure, how she’d known what had happened. He’d just come home from law school one day, short
ly after that horrible night, a twenty-one-year-old kid trying to raise his sister after their father’s heart attack the year before and their mother’s death from hepatitis the year before that, and found Leslie and Julie sitting on the couch.

  Not all that unusual, seeing that Leslie chaired the county’s Pet Adoption and Rescue Fund, a charitable fund that raised much of the money that helped support more than twenty shelters and neutering programs in a thirty-mile radius along the coast. Julie had run for and won election to junior chair of the fund her sophomore year in high school.

  She’d been sitting on the committee’s board ever since. Now with a college degree in finance, Julie was also part of the Sunshine Children’s League—which raised funds for children without families, providing funding for basic necessities but also some scholarships to California state universities.

  She attended luncheons and organized fundraisers. She shopped at the stores she loved and occasionally went to dinner with a girlfriend or two.

  But she didn’t date. She never frequented dinner establishments where she might run into a Smyth. She hadn’t been back to Santa Barbara—home to the Smyth mansion where the rape had taken place—in ten years.

  And she almost never attended evening social functions.

  Colin gave up trying to change her mind that night.

  * * *

  FROM THE MINUTE she walked into the glitzy ballroom Thursday night, Chantel changed. As though she’d been born to wealth, her persona slid over her, oozing a confidence that surprised her as she entered the elegant party in the five-star resort on the Pacific coastline.

  For that night she was a woman of privilege. And she was a woman on the prowl. Not unlike most of the unattached—and probably some of the attached, as well—women there. But unlike the rest of her unlikely peers, Chantel, while prowling for a man, wasn’t there for personal gain. She wanted to pick up a man as badly as any of them. Maybe worse.

  But she wasn’t hoping he’d take her home. To the contrary. She wanted him locked up in an eight-by-eight cell, where she knew he’d never be able to hurt his wife again. Picturing the key to the cell flying through the air and landing in the ocean beyond the wall of windows at one end of the elegantly appointed room, Chantel sent a silent promise to Ryder Morrison that he wasn’t going to spend the next several years watching his father beat up his mother. Or living in fear that his father would someday come after him with a baseball bat as he had his own little brother so many years before.

  Not that arresting the man would guarantee that. They needed to build a case against him, find ample enough proof that no matter who came to the powerful man’s rescue, the prosecutor could still win a conviction.

  It wouldn’t be easy. James Morrison was a respected and very rich man who’d funded many of the seated politicians in California’s congress. He probably had blackmail goods on others.

  And that was where she came in. With her blond hair curling over her breasts, the ample cleavage that was visible in the V of the black, figure-hugging and glittering gown she’d worn for her debut evening as the daughter of an East Coast millionaire newly settling in California, Chantel remembered the mantra that Wayne had been repeating almost hourly the week since they’d won approval for this sting.

  Patience.

  “Undercover work isn’t about going in and getting it done,” he’d told her. “It’s about taking the time to become intimate with the life you’re infiltrating.”

  Used to being the one who bulldozed ahead and made things happen, Chantel paused just inside the door of the richly decorated room. She’d passed her first test—handing off her invitation at the door.

  Gleaned from the police commissioner himself. A man she’d never met, a man who wouldn’t be acknowledging her presence that night—though he would surely be there, even if just to put in an appearance.

  He’d agreed to the sting, wanted her to get Morrison if he turned out to be guilty of beating up his wife.

  But he was expecting Chantel to clear the textile magnate’s name. Morrison and Commissioner Paul Reynolds were golf buddies. They went way back.

  Or so she’d been told.

  Still, she couldn’t know the commissioner. Not newly arrived from upstate New York as she was.

  And she wasn’t about to get cozy with James Morrison, either. No, her job was to infiltrate the community. Become friendly with those who knew Morrison. People who could let things drop that a police officer might be able to use to find the dirt on him. The truth about him.

  Her job was to find out the man’s deepest secrets, and if those secrets involved raising even a little finger to his wife or son, to expose him for the criminal that he was. She was there to get the proof...

  * * *

  COLIN WORKED THE room as his father had taught him, making time for each and every one of the firm’s clients. Shaking hands. Being available to anyone who might need advice on the spot.

  And making certain that Fairbanks and Fairbanks’s top-grade lawyers, all in their tuxes and sipping on nothing more lethal than club soda, were ready to step into any situation that required more complicated legal machinations.

  Though Colin was certainly as skilled and capable as the best of them, his job as the rainmaker, and CEO, of Fairbanks and Fairbanks required that he know about every single deal his firm handled. Which meant that he couldn’t possibly give his wealthy clients the time and attention they required for drawing up complicated contracts with all t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

  Colin handled the beginning and the end. The handshakes. Occasionally, on cases that took unexpected turns, he’d be in the middle, too.

  His self-appointed job—his purpose in life—was to make certain that integrity was at the root of everything touched by a Fairbanks. He owed that to Julie.

  And to the parents who’d died young and counted on him to protect her. He was a lawyer—educated at Stanford, graduated from the top of his class—and he’d been unable to bring his sister justice.

  He’d learned young—and the hard way—that integrity was rare, and he couldn’t count on it from anyone but Julie. Ever.

  He hadn’t seen Jaime yet—she was busy behind the scenes getting ready for the opening of the curtain that would highlight all of the night’s top auction pieces on the revolving stage that had been set up in the middle of the room—but he hoped to be able to say hello. To invite Julie’s friend to dine with them one night before she left town, to hear what Jaime thought of the Julie she’d seen that week.

  Not that he’d gossip about his sister. But Jaime had known Julie before the incident. She’d gotten into trouble with her a time or two. Like the time they’d climbed to the top of the water tower to hold up a sign, a piece of artwork, really, made by Jaime, protesting the fact that they’d been told they couldn’t pray in school.

  Catching sight of the police commissioner, he made a sharp turn and a beeline for the bar, where he ordered a Scotch and water. The water in deference to the fact that he was driving. He kept his back to the room. Commissioner Reynolds didn’t stay long at these things—usually leaving his deputy commissioner to the public relations duties required by the office he held—but with the Smyths in attendance, it was no surprise the commissioner had shown, as well. And if Colin turned around to look, he was sure he’d see Smyth, too. They were always together.

  He hadn’t seen either of the David Smyths that evening. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. He’d faced them down many times, with polite indifference. Each and every time they were the first to look away.

  He took some small measure of satisfaction in that. Not nearly enough to even hope to heal his sister’s wounds, the damage they’d done to his family, but it allowed him to walk among them.

  Julie was determined that people like the Smyths—people who bought police commissioners off rather than being
accountable to their actions—would not chase out of town the people with integrity, namely the Fairbankses.

  And that was the strongest reason Colin hung around. Because it was what Julie needed.

  He could be a good lawyer anywhere and might even be better suited at finding a woman who didn’t bore him if he weren’t still living in the same small society in which he’d grown up. Or at least find one that he trusted to like him for the man he was inside, not for the man who happened to have a few million in his bank account.

  One thing was for certain. While there were ample numbers of women here who would be eager to wear his ring, not one of them was willing to sign a prenuptial agreement.

  He knew. He’d made quite a reputation for himself a few years back when he’d been on the brink of proposing and had brought up the prenuptial subject as a way of leading into the proposal. He’d actually thought love drove the liaison that time. That the woman in question understood that unless Julie married, Colin’s inheritance would one day go to her.

  He supposed it was lucky that he’d never made it to the proposal stage. He’d been saved from being married for his money. “A glass of Chateau Ste. Michelle Pinot, please?”

  The voice, coming from just behind him on the left, seemed to pour over Colin’s shoulder and down his body. Smooth and cultured, like she’d attended one of those finishing schools that always seemed to take anything natural and real out of women. And yet...with a hint of husky, too. A hint that maybe this particular woman hadn’t been a complete success at that school.