Shattered. Joan Johnston

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СКАЧАТЬ gaze skipped down to his long-fingered hands. Those hands had caressed her with infinite tenderness. Had they also strangled the woman found naked in his bed? It had only been six weeks since the sensational story had hit the tabloids. Billionaire businessman Wyatt Shaw was accused of murdering a call girl in his suite on the top floor of Shaw Tower.

      A call girl?

      That gave their night together an entirely new complexion. Had Shaw thought she was a call girl, too? Had she left before he’d put his money on the bedside table? Was the magical night she remembered merely one more sexual encounter with a call girl for him? Had she been lucky that long-ago night to escape with her life?

      Kate was afraid to look back up into Shaw’s eyes, afraid the question—the accusation—would be there in her own.

      Her knees felt rubbery, and she stiffened them. She glanced beyond Wyatt’s shoulder, searching the street for Jack’s SUV, hoping he would stay away until she could get rid of this apparition from her past, this stranger who’d ruined her sleep for far too many nights over the past nine years.

      Kate shuddered at the thought of Texas Ranger Jack McKinley confronting Wyatt Shaw with his gun drawn. She didn’t want Jack killing the father of her sons. Or Wyatt killing the man she loved.

      “We need to talk,” Shaw said.

      “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

      He lifted an arrogant brow that accused her of the terrible wrong she’d done him. But said nothing.

      “You can’t have them.” Kate knew the instant the words came out of her mouth that she shouldn’t have spoken them.

      “By them do you mean my sons?” he said, the sudden menace in his voice raising the hairs on her nape.

      She tried to slam the door, but he was too fast for her. He simply caught the frame with his palm, waited until she let go, waited another moment until she stepped back, then strode inside and closed the wooden door with a quiet snick behind him.

      She turned to face him in her tiny living room like a lioness defending her cubs, even though the twins were at school and wouldn’t be home for another hour. “You can’t have them. They’re mine.”

      “And mine,” he said inexorably.

      She could see that denial was futile. Somehow he’d found out the truth. “Who told you?”

      “A private investigator hired by your mother-in-law.”

      Kate groaned and lowered her face into her hands. She suddenly lifted her head and asked, “Does Ann Wade know?”

      “I have no idea. The P.I. who contacted me was killed shortly after he left my office.”

      Did you kill him? The words stuck in Kate’s throat. There was no sense asking, since he was unlikely to tell her if he had.

      “When did you know the twins were mine?” he asked.

      Kate felt a frisson of fear skitter down her spine. She had never been a good liar. The telltale pink blotches on her creamy skin always gave her away. But she was terrified of what the man standing in her living room might do if she told him she’d known within weeks of that fateful night that she’d gotten pregnant during their liaison.

      The same day she’d gotten a positive result on a home pregnancy test, she’d seduced J.D., who’d gloated at how brief her sex boycott had been after she’d caught him in bed with another woman.

      “You were a stranger I met in a bar,” she said to Shaw. “I didn’t know your name. I didn’t know how to contact you.”

      “You didn’t answer the question,” he said, anger simmering in his eyes. “When did you know?”

      “I couldn’t be sure my husband wasn’t the father,” she lied. And felt the sudden heat on her throat and cheeks.

      His eyes narrowed. “It’s a simple question.”

      Whenever she’d felt guilty over the years that she hadn’t sought out the stranger from the bar to tell him the truth, she’d reminded herself of the circumstances of their encounter. It was a night out of time.

      She’d felt vindicated when she’d discovered who he was.

      “What 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, СКАЧАТЬ