I’ve only been with two men.
Her low laughter sounded of doubt. “I guessed I should have been wary when things started moving so quickly that I couldn’t keep up. One day, I was attending school, and the next, he was putting a ring on my finger and telling me he wanted to spend his life with me. It was only a couple of months after we’d met. I’d tried to convince myself that it was because he was older and more mature. That he was ready for things to progress faster than me.”
Regret dimmed the light on her striking face. “I should have known I was nothing more than an easy target. A naïve girl who was blinded by his promises.”
Her tongue darted out, glancing across the sticky sweetness on her lips. I couldn’t help but become fixated on the action. “It became clear pretty quickly that he had his life mapped out. He needed a wife. Someone to stand at his side and make him look like the perfect guy. The perfect husband and the perfect father. I think I was nothing but a diversion to cover who he really was. It kept people from digging deeper into his personal life.”
Those eyes found mine over my desk. “I just wanted a regular family, and Reed wanted to rule the world. He was committed to doing absolutely anything he needed to do to achieve it.”
I cringed, hating the idea that I could have one thing in common with that asshole.
Her head minutely shook. “You asked me yesterday if I loved him, and I did. But it was never as deeply . . . as passionately . . . as it should have been. But that didn’t matter anyway because Reed had his own penchants.”
My eyes tracked the way her delicate throat bobbed when she swallowed. “He’d be gone at all hours of the night . . .”
A small hiccup climbed her throat, and tears blurred her eyes. “I’d been certain he was having an affair. I followed him once . . . and I . . . he was actually hooking up with a prostitute. I was shocked, but as time went on, I realized it went deeper than that. My gut screamed that he was crooked. Involved in things that he shouldn’t be. Our house full of whispers. All of his meetings carried out behind closed doors. Everything was a secret. He’d begun to threaten me. Trying to control my every move. Mold me into who he wanted me to be, and that was someone who kept her mouth shut and turned a blind eye.”
She sucked in a shaky breath, twisting her fingers so tightly that they were turning white. “But that’s not me, Mr. Jacobs. It’s not me, and there was no way I was going to raise my two small children in that kind of environment. The problem was that I had no proof. I’d never seen anything solid. Reed made sure of that. But still, I knew. I knew.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” I told her, unable to keep my mouth shut when I knew I should. “That I don’t feel that in you?”
“I need you to. I need you to believe I’d never willingly put my children in this situation.” She touched her chest like she wanted to offer me part of it. “The first time I left him, Thomas was four and Mallory was only a few months old. I left in the middle of the night while he was gone on a business trip.”
My hand was moving across the sheet, taking down every detail, teeth grinding the whole time.
Trying to convince myself it was just another case.
Just another case.
Her voice was shaking as she continued, words barely scraping free of her throat. “I’d gone to California, thinking if I got far enough away, he wouldn’t be able to find me, or maybe I was just hoping that he’d forget. Take it as an easy out. It only took him two days to track us down. It was the first time he . . .”
Her words trailed off, and I felt the last piece of sanity slip.
“Grace,” I whispered.
She squeezed her eyes closed, gave a sharp shake of her head, and opened those gorgeous blue eyes to me. So deep and good, and I knew right then and there that I was drowning.
“Let’s just say he forced me to go back with him. He told me I’d never see my children again if I didn’t. I relented, not because I was weak, but because I had no idea what else to do. No way to fight a family as powerful as his. I was a twenty-three-year-old girl who had a cosmetology license, which was a miracle he’d even permitted me to get, with two children, and his family owned half of South Carolina. And he wasn’t exactly painting me in a pretty light. But I knew one day, one day I would find a way.”
“God, Grace.”
Her lips pinched, and she exhaled. “After that, I fought him every inch of the way. Refused to let him touch me, and he’d force me, anyway. I just kept praying he’d get tired enough of it that he’d let us go. Or, that I’d find proof. Something to hold over his head.”
Disbelief shook her head. “And I still don’t know that I did, I went on a hunch, but what I found has been enough to scare him. Enough that he’s kept his distance. But I know that his pride is taking hits, and he’s about to crack.”
My hand stilled over the notepad, voice too eager. “What did you find?”
“He was always neurotically secretive about his office.” She bit out a scornful laugh. “We weren’t allowed inside. I had a gut feeling that if I could just get in there, I would find something . . . something to use against him. He’d left to Washington, and I was able to sneak in. I went through everything, thinking I had nothing, until I found a safe hidden behind a big picture.”
Disbelief flashed through her expression. “I’d thought there was no chance I’d get into it, but he’d actually used the kids’ birthdates. I found . . . I found a picture. A picture that I knew meant something, even though I wasn’t sure of what. So, I took it, Mr. Jacobs. I took it.”
She fumbled in her bag and pulled out an enlarged picture.
She slid it across the desk to me.
I picked it up, guts twisted up in a thousand knots when I saw what she’d found.
It was shadowy and grainy as fuck, but I was ninety-nine percent sure it was Reed Dearborne down on the docks in the middle of the night, standing with his back to the camera, surrounded by a few men who I couldn’t make out.
Large metal containers were being unloaded from a cargo ship. But it was the men facing the camera holding machine guns across their chests that had the breath punching from my lungs.
My body shot forward as I tried to make sense of what Grace had found. “You . . .” I was barely able to look up at her. “You found this in his safe?”
It wasn’t like I wasn’t well aware of the shady shit that went down at the docks. The mess my brother and his wife had gotten themselves into was proof of that. The cases I’d represented. The things I knew. Almost touching, but always on the fringes.
But this?
This could be a bombshell.
My spirit shook. What was this bastard involved in?
Terror ripped through her body when she nodded. “Yes . . . it was in a secret compartment at the bottom.”
She started to rush, leaning forward, “This was why I said that I didn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. I don’t want my children involved in this. Honestly, I don’t even know what it means. All I know is that my having it is the only reason my children and I are still at my grandmother’s. I went there because I didn’t want him to think I was cowering or hiding. That I would face him out in the open. I . . . I told him I made a bunch of copies and, if anything happened to me, they were going to be sent to every news media outlet that I knew of.”
“And he backed down?”
She exhaled heavily. “I think it was the only reason he didn’t find a way to stop the divorce. He was scared. But over time, I think he’s come to believe I’m bluffing.”
“Are you?” I challenged, not sure how far she would be willing to go. The danger something like this might pose.
Nausea swirled through my guts, my mind riddled with what Thomas had told me he overheard.
Bitches who don’t obey need to bleed.
Her chin lifted, and she shifted, switching the legs she had crossed. My eyes got locked there, snagged on the motion.
On all that smooth, silky skin.
I could still feel it burning under my needy hands.
I was slammed with it—a convulsion of lust.