Shattered. Joan Johnston
did you expect me to do when I found out I’d gotten pregnant while having sex with a perfect stranger?” A stranger accused of graft and corruption, of extortion and murder. And that was before a woman was found strangled to death in your bed.
His brows arrowed down at her admission that she’d known from the start what he’d just learned.
“You could have gone back to the hotel,” he said. “There were people there who knew me. You could have found me.”
“To what purpose?” she demanded. “I was married. For all I knew, you could have been married, too.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I didn’t know that. Besides, there was always the chance that my husband—”
“You’ve cheated me out of knowing my sons for eight years.”
Kate’s blue eyes flashed up at him. “I notice you never came looking for me!”
“I couldn’t find you. And not for want of trying.”
Kate was startled. He’d searched for her? Why? “Just because the sex was good—”
“The sex was fantastic. But that wasn’t why I came looking for you.”
Kate knew she’d regret asking, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Why, then?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Irritated by his reticence, she snapped, “So why are you here? What do you want?”
He met her gaze with annoying calm and said, “I want to meet my sons.”
“No.” Kate’s throat was tight with dread, but she forced herself to add, “They believe J.D.—my husband, who was killed serving in Afghanistan—was their father.”
“I don’t want my sons growing up without a father.”
As he had, Kate realized. The first time she’d seen Shaw on TV was the day he consoled Dante D’Amato on the steps of the federal courthouse in Houston after his two grown, legitimate sons had been killed by a car bomb. The mob boss was on trial for RICO-related offenses, and the reporter suggested that D’Amato’s sons had been murdered in an effort by underlings to wrench control of the mob from D’Amato’s powerful hands, in expectation that he would be convicted and go to prison.
When a roving TV reporter asked a grieving D’Amato who would take the roles in his business left vacant by his sons’ deaths, D’Amato slid his arm around Wyatt Shaw’s broad shoulders and said, “I have all the help I need right here.”
The news anchor at the station had explained that Shaw’s mother had been supported by D’Amato, who’d bought her a home in Houston, but they’d never been married. Thereby suggesting, without actually saying, that Wyatt Shaw was Dante D’Amato’s illegitimate son, and that he might be expected to take over the mob if his father was convicted.
The film clip that followed showed a grim-faced man with silver-winged black hair shoving his way through a crowd of reporters as he left the federal courthouse.
It was the man she’d picked up in the bar of the Four Seasons, a man passionate beyond her dreams and tender beyond belief.
Kate had blanched with horror at the discovery that she’d lain with a man who’d been accused, along with his mob boss father, of having business competitors maimed and murdered. She’d followed the trial on TV. Neither Shaw nor his father had been convicted. The witnesses had all recanted or disappeared.
The pictures Kate had seen in the tabloid newspapers of that poor strangled woman had put an end to her romantic fantasies about the stranger with whom she’d spent a precious night of lovemaking.
She’d viciously squelched the memories that arose whenever she compared that single night of passion to sex with J.D. She’d comforted herself with the knowledge that her husband might be a selfish lover and a womanizer, but at least he wasn’t a criminal.
Or so she’d thought.
“You don’t have to worry about Lucky and Chance growing up without a father,” she told Shaw. “I’m involved with someone. I love him very much, and we’re going to be married.” She was certain Jack wouldn’t mind if she stretched the truth in a good cause. They hadn’t discussed marriage yet, but she was sure it was only a matter of time before they did.
Jack’s divorce would be final within the next month. And J.D. was…no longer in the picture.
“Since I’m going to be married,” Kate began, “I—”
Shaw was already shaking his head. “No, you’re not.”
“You can’t stop me!”
“We both know your first husband isn’t dead. Which precludes your marriage to another man.”
Kate’s face blanched. “How could you possibly…? Why would you think…?”
“I’ve done some investigating of my own in the week since I discovered I’m a father. You can’t marry another man, because you’re still married to J.D. Pendleton, who isn’t buried in Arlington Cemetery after all. He’s alive and well and left the country for Brazil the day after you were shot.”
“J.D.’s in Brazil?” Her husband had threatened to kidnap her sons and take them to South America if she didn’t pay him a quarter of a million dollars to get out of her life, but she’d been shot before she could ask one of her grandfathers for the money. Although Kate was the daughter and granddaughter of wealthy men and women, J.D. had gambled away her personal trust fund within a few years after she’d gotten control of it when she turned twenty-five.
However, J.D.’s mother had given him $250,000 in “hush money” which he’d presumably used to disappear. The governor didn’t want the world to know her son was a live deserter, rather than a dead war hero.
Kate’s greatest fear, before Wyatt Shaw had shown up on her doorstep, was that J.D. would return, once again threatening to steal Lucky and Chance, and demanding money that she didn’t have to disappear. “Do you know where J.D. is now?” she asked.
“No. But there are dangerous men out there looking for him.”
“Dangerous men?” Kate asked, confused. Your men? she wondered.
“Your husband was trading military weapons for heroin in Afghanistan.”
Kate gasped. She’d known J.D. was in trouble. He’d hinted as much to her when he’d shown up in her kitchen last fall looking gaunt and ragged a year after she’d supposedly buried his remains. But she’d never suspected him of doing anything so awful. “How do you know that?”
Shaw ignored the question and continued, “Your husband blew up that ammo dump in Afghanistan—and faked his death—to avoid paying the consequences for skimming profits on the arms-for-heroin deals he was negotiating between parties here in the States and the Taliban. He absconded with twenty million dollars worth of heroin that didn’t belong to him.
“There are people who intend to find him, get back their product—or the cash he got for selling it—and make an object lesson of your husband.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“The bad guys are closing in on J.D.”
“How do you know all this?”
He lifted a dark brow as though the answer should be obvious, although it wasn’t to Kate. Did he know about J.D.’s situation because he, personally, was chasing him? Or was it some other criminal element with whom Shaw had close ties, like his father, Dante D’Amato?
“Suffice it to say, you and your—our—sons aren’t safe with your husband on the loose.”
Kate lifted her chin. “The man I’ve been seeing is a Texas Ranger. He’ll be happy to protect me.”