Czytaj książkę: «From Mistake To Millions»

One

Being the boss was boring as hell.

Harley Dalton sat on the top floor of his Washington, DC, office building and flipped through some reports. He wasn’t reading them. Managing a company wasn’t really his thing. He’d started one only because he didn’t want to take orders again after getting out of the navy.

He’d never expected it to be so successful. Dalton Security now had four offices in the US and one in London, with hundreds of employees. They were the company to call if you found yourself in a bind, or if a situation needed to be handled. Nothing outright illegal, of course, but things would be dealt with in a quick and efficient manner that sometimes fell into a fuzzy gray area.

One of the things his company had handled was the recent abduction of a fourteen-year-old girl. She’d run away with her soccer coach, who was nearly fifty. It was on the nationwide news as people hunted for the young girl across the Midwest. It was also on the news when Dalton Security successfully tracked down, apprehended and delivered the pervert who’d kidnapped her to the front door of the police station, a little worse for wear. The girl was returned home safely. Dalton’s stock prices had shot through the roof. All ended well.

At least well enough, considering Harley found himself in stuffy suits sitting at big desks talking to people all day. He wasn’t the one in the field anymore and it grated on him. He wasn’t toting a Glock and apprehending suspects. He was a damn paper pusher now.

He’d never imagined that being a millionaire would suck so hard.

“Mr. Dalton?” His assistant’s voice chimed over the intercom on his phone.

“Yes?” he replied, trying not to growl at Faye. It wasn’t her fault he was feeling strangled by his silk tie today.

“I have a Mr. Jeffries on the phone, sir.”

Jeffries? The name didn’t sound familiar. “Who is he?”

“He says he’s the CEO of St. Francis Hospital in Charleston.”

Now why would the CEO of a Charleston hospital be calling him? Harley had been born and raised in the city, but hadn’t been back in a decade. His mother still lived there. He’d bought her a beautiful old plantation house that he had yet to visit. The CEO wouldn’t be calling if something had happened to his mother. What could it be? Normally Harley didn’t take phone calls from people he didn’t know, but his curiosity was piqued.

“Put him through,” he told Faye.

The phone chimed a moment later and he picked up. “This is Dalton,” he said.

“Hello. This is Weston Jeffries. I’m the CEO of the St. Francis Hospital group in Charleston. I was hoping to speak with you about a...situation we’re having here.”

“Normally new cases are handled by our client intake department,” Harley said. If they wanted special surveillance equipment or needed to investigate pending hires, that didn’t need to come across his desk.

“I understand that,” Mr. Jeffries said. “But from one CEO to another, this is a really delicate situation for us. We’ve already gotten more media scrutiny than we care to.”

Media scrutiny? Apparently he needed to pay more attention to what was going on back home. “Well, why don’t you tell me what’s happening and I’ll see what we can do.”

“We’ve been contacted by a woman who claims she was switched at birth when she was born at our hospital here in 1989. She’d thought at first maybe she’d been adopted, but her parents are adamant that they delivered a daughter at St. Francis that day. She believes them, so in her mind, that only leaves the possibility that she was switched as an infant here. We are looking for someone to investigate what happened, as quietly as possible. The woman has already gone to the local news and we don’t want to make the situation worse than it already is.”

While someone being switched at birth was interesting and potentially damaging to the hospital, he still wasn’t sure why the man insisted on speaking to him about it. Then again, Harley was bored to tears. He might as well listen. “Do you believe the hospital was at fault?”

“It’s hard to say. Our technology and security weren’t as good back then as they are now. The woman was also born in the middle of Hurricane Hugo, so it wasn’t exactly business as usual around the hospital at that time.”

Hurricane Hugo? That was an odd coincidence. His girlfriend back in high school had been born during Hurricane Hugo. His mind was suddenly flooded with memories of the willowy blonde who had headlined his teenage fantasies. She had been beautiful, smart and way out of his league. After she’d dumped him, he’d tried to put the memory of her in the past where it belonged, but he found that thoughts of her crept into his mind more often than he liked.

Like now.

He wasn’t listening to a word the man was saying. “What was the woman’s name?” he interrupted.

“Jade Nolan.”

Upon hearing her name, Harley felt as if someone had reached out and punched him in the gut. Jade. Of all the women in Charleston, it had to be her case that dropped in his lap. Against his better judgment, he knew in that moment that his company would take the case. He also knew that for the first time in several years, he was going to handle it personally.

It might not be the healthiest thing to do, emotionally, but he had to see her again. It had been almost twelve years since she’d broken up with him and run off with that insipid little weasel, Lance Rhodes. He’d heard that she’d married him. Maybe she was still married to him. He’d seemed to be everything she wanted. Everything Harley wasn’t.

Call it morbid curiosity. Call it a reason to get out of this office with the walls closing in on him like a Star Wars trash compactor. But he was driving to Charleston in the morning.

“Mr. Dalton?”

Harley again realized he’d been sitting silently on the line for too long. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffries. We’ll take the case. Someone will be calling you back to get more details, but I will be down in Charleston within the week.”

“You’re going to handle it personally?”

“In this situation, yes.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Dalton. I look forward to speaking to you when you come into town.”

The call ended and Harley sat back in his chair to consider the ramifications of what he’d just done. Taking the case on wasn’t the problem. He had no doubt that his team would uncover the truth of what had happened, if anything had happened at all. Going down personally was another matter. He could tell himself it was a good excuse to visit his mother and see his old stomping grounds, but anyone who knew him back then would know that he was going down there to see Jade.

She wasn’t the right kind of girl for him. He’d known that back in high school. He’d spent a lot of time in detention, while she was the treasurer of the National Honor Society. They ran in completely different social circles—Jade with the smart kids and him with the juvenile delinquents. And yet the first moment he’d laid eyes on her in their French class, he knew he was done for.

Maybe it was those big Bambi eyes that stood out against her pale skin and ice-blond hair. Even now, he remembered what it felt like to rub those silky strands between his fingers. She’d always looked at him with a touch of curiosity and anxiety hidden beneath thick lashes. The anxiety he was used to; he’d had quite the reputation around their high school. It was the curiosity that intrigued him.

Although he was doing fine in French, he’d pretended he wasn’t and had approached her about tutoring him after school for some extra cash. He knew her family didn’t have a lot of money. Neither did he, but he was willing to part with what little he had to spend some time with her.

Harley had paid her ten dollars a week for the rest of the semester to sit with him and practice French. He’d ended up getting an A in the class, which wasn’t his goal, but it hadn’t hurt. He’d just wanted to spend time with Jade, and he didn’t think she would do it otherwise. He was wrong. One sultry summer night in Charleston, he’d worked up the nerve to kiss her, and everything had changed. Including him.

He had spent most of his youth running wild. His mother, a single mom, had worked two jobs to keep them afloat, so he’d spent most of his time without adult supervision. When he was with Jade, his usual pastimes didn’t seem as exciting anymore. He’d found he much preferred the rush of kissing her, or nearly being caught by her parents when he’d sneak in through her bedroom window at night. She was everything he hadn’t thought he would want. His previous romantic experiences had involved girls with too much makeup and too much time on their hands.

Jade thought about nothing but the future. She’d been so desperate to avoid the struggles of her parents that she was constantly worried about her grades, which college she might get into and what she was going to do with her life. He had no doubt that one day she would be Dr. Jade Nolan.

What Harley wasn’t so sure about was how he might fit into Jade’s future. Apparently, she had the same concerns. Not long after she’d started college, she broke things off with him. He knew as well as anybody that they weren’t right for each other—or more accurately, that he wasn’t good enough for her. So he hadn’t fought to keep her. That was one of his biggest regrets, if he admitted to any at all. He preferred to look forward. And that’s what he’d done.

A week later, he’d walked into the navy recruiting office and never looked back. He hadn’t seen Jade since that day they broke up, despite her being on his mind all the time.

Glancing down now at the information he’d copied into his notebook during the call, he figured that was all about to change.

* * *

The doorbell rang.

Jade knew the investigator the hospital had hired was coming to interview her today, so she leaped up from the couch when she heard the chime ring through the house. Someone from St. Francis had called to make sure she would be home. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would tell the investigator, since she’d been literally just born at the time the incident took place, but at the very least, she could get an idea of who this person was and how he or she would handle things.

The company had been hired by the hospital, after all. Her best friend and pro bono attorney, Sophie, had given her sound advice. She’d suggested they go to the local media when the hospital had tried to brush her off. Within twenty-four hours of her interview with the press, the hospital’s legal team had phoned and told her they were hiring a third-party investigator to determine what had happened. Apparently they’d gotten a lot of flak, especially when the news station contacted them and they refused to comment.

That was a week ago. Things had changed quickly.

Jade went to answer the door, flinging it open in a rush, and then stopping short as she recognized the man standing on her porch. In an instant, her heart stuttered, her body stiffened. It was like she’d run straight into a brick wall she hadn’t seen coming.

“Hello, Jade.”

There was no way she could’ve seen this coming. Her mouth dropped open, the words dying on her lips. She couldn’t even manage to say hello. Not with her ex-boyfriend Harley Dalton standing on her front porch.

It had been forever since she’d seen him—her first semester of college, to be precise. A lot had changed about Harley since then. He was bigger now. Brawny, almost. She’d heard that he went into the navy after they’d broken up, and it showed as his broad shoulders strained against his expensive, tailored gray suit coat. He’d dwarfed her in high school and there was an even more pronounced size difference between them now.

A lot of things were still the same, however. The dark blue eyes with the wicked glint. The broken nose. The devilish smile that promised more than she could handle, then or now...

The way he looked at her was different, though. The heat in his eyes wasn’t stoked by desire today. It felt more like animosity. And close scrutiny. It was startling to see that, although Jade supposed he might still be mad at her for breaking up with him all those years ago.

“Jade?” He arched a brow, a questioning look on his face.

She clamped her jaw shut and nodded. “Hello, Harley,” she finally managed to say. “Sorry.”

“So you do remember me,” he said with a smirk.

As though she was ever likely to forget. He’d been her first love. Maybe her only real love, if she was honest with herself. She wasn’t about to let him know that. “Of course I remember you. What are you doing here?”

“St. Francis hired me—my company, rather—to look into your claims of staff misconduct at the hospital.”

Jade hadn’t kept tabs on Harley over the years, but that type of work seemed right up his alley. Maybe if she had paid more attention, she wouldn’t have been blindsided when the hospital hired him—the one man she’d managed to avoid successfully all these years. “Oh,” she said, trying not to sound disappointed or concerned. There wasn’t much she could do about it now. Even if she called the hospital and complained later, it wouldn’t get Harley Dalton off her front porch today.

“They didn’t tell me who to expect. I didn’t realize... Come in,” she offered, taking a step back from the door to let him inside her small rental house.

As he stepped over the threshold, the faint breeze blew in with him and brought the scent of him to her nose. The woodsy fragrance of his cologne mingled with his familiar manly musk immediately took her back to being eighteen again. To snuggling against him in his pickup truck. To fogging up the windows while he nibbled on her neck...

Whatever confidence and self-assurance she’d gained over the years faded to nothing when she looked at him. In their place was a flutter of butterflies in her stomach and a sudden awareness of parts of her body that she hadn’t noticed in a very long time. Maybe since the last time she’d touched Harley. Lance had been a lot of things, but an intensely sexual creature was not one of them.

Jade had been okay with that. She’d traded that intense passion for security and stability. Or so she’d thought. Being around Harley again had just reminded her of everything she’d passed up in her quest for a better life.

It was a high price to pay. She’d been in the same room with him for less than a minute now and was already almost overwhelmed by his presence. She needed a moment alone or wasn’t sure she could get through a half hour interview without making a fool of herself.

“Would you like something to drink? Some sweet tea?” she asked.

“Sure. Thank you.”

Jade gestured toward the couch. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.”

She immediately turned on her heel and disappeared into the kitchen, trying to erase from her mind the image of him smiling at her. At one time, she’d lamented the closed-off floor plan of the older home she was renting, but now was relieved to have a barrier of wood and drywall between them.

Jade took her time pouring two glasses of sweet tea, and even put together a plate of cookies. She remembered that Harley had a sweet tooth, and that bought her a few more seconds to compose herself. But eventually she had to go back to the living room and face him again.

She wasn’t sure what to think of his sudden appearance, or the faint scowl on his face. Questions were swirling through her mind. Did he not believe her side of the story about being switched? He had been hired by the hospital, after all. Or was it because he was still angry with her? If so, why had he taken the case? Was it because he still found her attractive? If so, did she really care? She wasn’t really equipped to deal with something like that right now, what with everything else in her life spinning out of control.

“Do you need any help?”

Jade jerked her head up and saw Harley peeking around the corner. Trying not to look startled, she took the plate of cookies and handed it to him. “Here, take these. I’ll carry the tea.”

“Mmm, shortbread,” he said, appreciation lighting his eyes.

“Those were your favorites, weren’t they?” she asked, wishing immediately that she hadn’t. She didn’t want him to think she recalled things like that after all these years apart.

“They still are. I can’t believe you remember.” Harley popped a cookie into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully, drawing Jade’s attention to his full lips.

A lot of time had passed, and yet it felt like almost none at all when she looked at Harley. She could almost feel those lips on hers as if it was yesterday. He might have been a bad boy, but he was a good kisser. A great one.

How long had it been since Jade had been kissed?

A real kiss. Not a peck. A long, slow, toe-curling kiss? She didn’t even know. A long time. Sadly, it had been long before her husband turned away from her and had taken up drugs instead.

Deep inside, a part of her wished to experience that thrill of attraction again. To feel wanted and desired. But she knew that Harley was not the one to relight those fires. Those flames would be all consuming and that was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. Not back then and not now.

Harley finished his cookie and smiled at her in a way that made her wonder if he knew exactly what she was thinking. Jade had never been very good at hiding her emotions, but she needed to do better. Especially when he was around. He was here to interview her about her claims against the hospital, but she could just as easily be a teenager again, helping him study French over tea and cookies, and fantasizing about making it to second base.

He turned and walked into the living room, and with no other choice, she followed him. Harley sat on the end of the couch and she opted for the chair to his right. She set the tea on the table, unsure of how to start this conversation. Did they go straight to the investigation and ignore the elephant in the room? Or should they take the time to catch up after more than a decade of not seeing each other?

“So how have you been?” he asked, making the decision for her.

“Good,” she said on reflex. Since her divorce, people were always asking her how she was. She found they didn’t really want to hear the truth. “Most days, at least. A lot has changed since I saw you last, but I’m doing okay.”

Harley glanced down at her hand and his brows knitted together in confusion. Presumably he was looking for the wedding ring she’d taken off a long time ago. “I heard you married Lance, but I don’t see a ring.”

“I did marry him. My junior year of college,” Jade said. “It ended a couple years ago.”

Harley straightened, apparently unaware of what had happened. She was surprised the investigator hadn’t thoroughly looked into her past before he’d arrived. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

Jade could only nod. She didn’t want to tell him about what had happened with Lance. It wasn’t a pretty story, but it had been in the news and anyone with a desire to could look it up. He could get all the details if he wanted to know.

“What about you? Any family?”

Harley chuckled and shook his head. “Oh, no. I spent eight years in the navy, traveling all over the world. There wasn’t much time for starting a family or even settling down in one spot. After I got out, I started my own business. That takes up every moment of your day for a while. Thankfully, things are running smoothly, without my constant supervision, now.”

Jade hadn’t been sure what Harley would do with his life. Some had bet their money he’d end up in jail. Others, that he’d accomplish nothing. She had seen more potential in him than that, and was pleased to hear he’d become an entrepreneur.

“So your company does private investigations? Like hired detectives?”

“Not entirely. Across our five locations, we do a lot of different work that falls in the security detail bucket. Personal security and protection, home security setup and monitoring, missing persons cases...lots of different things where the police can’t or won’t step in, for whatever reason. We specialize in government contracts and a higher end clientele who want to keep things quiet. Investigations are just one aspect of what we do at Dalton Security.”

Dalton Security? Now that he’d said it, Jade realized she’d heard of the company. Maybe in reference to the recent Bennett kidnapping case. That had been on every news channel she’d seen for weeks. Dalton Security had broken the case wide open and delivered the teen back to her parents.

It had never occurred to her that it was Harley’s business. It sounded like he was doing even better for himself than she had hoped. The nice suit and gold Rolex on his wrist were evidence enough of that. She was glad to hear it. Jade knew his mother had struggled to raise him on her own. The last she remembered, Harley’s mom had worked as a cashier at a grocery store and cleaned houses on the side.

“This seems like a pretty puny job in the scheme of things your company handles. Why would the CEO of Dalton Security—of all people—be working a case like this?”

Harley’s gaze met hers and she felt a shiver run through her whole body. When he looked at her that way, it was as though he could see straight through her, into her soul. There was nothing she could hide from him. She was an open book left out for him to read if he wanted to bother. It was unnerving and thrilling at the same time. For so long, she’d felt invisible.

Harley saw her.

“Isn’t that obvious, Jade? I took the case so I could see you again.”