Secrets of the A-List Box Set, Volume 1 Page 5

  “When will I see you again?” Jarrod asked as she headed to the door. Elana turned and looked at him, long and lean, his hand holding his sack, supremely confident and utterly selfish. God, she wished he didn’t turn her on.

  “I don’t know, Jarrod,” she replied, her tone pointed. She gestured to the television and saw that they were running the footage of Luc and Rafe fighting again. Had Rafe really connected with Luc’s face? Jeez, she didn’t know he had in him. Returning her attention to her lover, she shrugged. “My family has gone into a spiral, my father could be dead for all I know, and you’re asking me when you are going to get screwed again?”

  Jarrod shrugged and tried to look innocent. “Well, yeah.”

  “You are such a prick,” Elana muttered before walking out of his bedroom.

  Unfortunately she was the female equivalent, because, dammit, there was a part of her that was always thinking about when she could return, how soon she could sneak away to see him again.

  * * *

  Trans-Atlantic calls were always difficult, and when one tried to speak English in a French accent to a busy and stressed nurse, the process was slow and frustrating. She tapped her fingers against her eighteenth-century drop-legged table and imagined throwing the blue-and-white dragon jar against the closest wall. Ming Dynasty, she reminded herself, Jiajing period, late sixteenth century. Priceless. Extraordinarily expensive.

  “You said you are calling from Paris?” the nurse clarified, her nasal twang hurting her ears.

  “Oui. Yes,” she corrected. “I’m a friend of Monsieur Marshall. How is he, s’il vous plaît?”

  “I am sorry, ma’am, I am not allowed to divulge any information about Mr. Marshall’s condition to anyone outside his direct family. That’s his wife or children.”

  I’m Parisian, not a moron, she thought, annoyed at the explanation. She forced herself to breathe deeply and maintain control of her temper, remembering her last explosion, when she threw an engraved Dutch champagne glass, circa early eighteenth century, out of the window onto the terrace. The owner of this magnificent apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain had not appreciated the way she expressed her disappointment with him and called her volatile Gallic temperament childish. She’d punished him for that, and he’d enjoyed every minute of it.

  In fact, he’d begged for more.

  Banging the receiver back into its cradle, Nora turned away, deeply frustrated. She wasn’t used to being thwarted, and when it did happen, it had the power to ruin the rest of her day.

  She had her wants and needs, and she was very used to having both fulfilled in the shortest time possible. And, right now, it was crucial that she discover the extent of Harrison’s injuries and what that meant for her. Oh, she was sad for him, worried even, but her future would be determined by whether Harrison lived or died.

  Merde! Stupid men and their stupid fast cars. Quel crétin!

  She trailed her fingernails across the back of an exquisite leather sofa, enjoying the contrast of the blinding-white fabric and her bright red nails, like droplets of fresh blood on pristine country snow. Tipping her head to the side, she pushed a strand of her blunt-cut bob behind her ear and touched the two-carat diamond stud in the lobe. Was it wrong to want more than this magnificent apartment on one of the best streets in Paris? It was decorated to her exact taste and style; apart from a few exquisite antiques being used as accent pieces, the style was modern contemporary. The apartment opened up onto a terrace and garden, allowing her the privacy she, and others, so desperately needed. Modern art was chosen for maximum effect, all subtly erotic, sensuous, oozing sex appeal. Her art and her apartment were a reflection of herself, sophisticated, a little dangerous and utterly stylish.

  She knew Paris, she adored Paris, but was it enough? Could it be when so much had changed? Plans had needed to be made even before Harrison’s accident, and now, today, her need was greater, the stakes higher.

  Danger might be a factor. Nora shrugged the thought away. Danger didn’t scare her. Being poor did—and she wasn’t about to let that happen. She still had a few aces up her sleeve.

  * * *

  Gabriel Santiago stepped out of the elevator and immediately recognized the curvy figure walking a few paces in front of him. If it had been anyone else but Elana, he would’ve appreciated the round ass in a too-short faded denim skirt showing off a spectacular pair of legs. Since those legs belonged to his cousin, his quasi sister, his protective big-brother instincts bolted to the surface.

  Ripped denim skirt and thousand-dollar shoes. Only in Elana’s world...

  “Elana! Wait up!” Gabe ordered, and when she turned around, his eyes scanned her face. He could read her better than most; he saw the fear and uncertainty in her eyes and knew, from her quavering chin, that tears were very close to the surface. Her long deep brown hair, the exact color of excellent Colombian coffee, hadn’t seen a brush that morning, and he could see a fine rash on her cheek.

  Razor burn. His cousin had just tumbled out of someone’s bed, and that someone, he was damn sure, wasn’t Thom. Not my circus, not my monkeys, Gabe thought. He had bigger problems to deal with than Elana’s sex life. In fact, he’d far prefer to assume that Elana didn’t have a sex life at all...

  “Gabe!” Elana opened her arms, and Gabe pulled her slight frame against his chest, burying his nose in her hair. She was like a cold, wet puppy, he thought, a little alone and a lot scared. He gathered her hair into his fist and gave it a tug, like he used to do when she was a kid. As he expected, Elana tipped her head back to look at him.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  Elana stepped back and tried to pull a smile onto her face. “I normally believe you, Gabe, but today I have my doubts. How is he? What do you know?”

  “Nothing more than what is on the news.” If there was ever a time that Luc and Rafe could drop their he’s-just-our-cousin routine, it should be today, but nope, neither of them had bothered to call him. Ignoring the slow, acidic burn of hurt, Gabe led Elana toward the doors leading to the intensive care ward, Elana’s hand in his. He was part of this family but not, part relative, part cousin, part servant. That wasn’t fair, Gabe thought—Mariella had never treated him like anything other than a beloved nephew. Neither, in fact, had Harrison. It was their precious sons who resented his presence in their lives, both in the Marshall empire and at Casa de Catalina. Neither Luc nor Rafe wanted to work at the family business, but they resented the fact that he did, that he had both Harrison’s and Mariella’s ears. They hated the fact that their parents trusted him with their family finances and consulted with him on all major decisions concerning the massive company they’d created. Because, while Harrison was the face of his empire, Mariella in many ways was the glue that held it all in place.

  When he was small, Gabe had liked to pretend that Mariella and not Ana, Mariella’s younger sister, was his mother. Who could blame him for not wanting to claim Ana, a wild child, sexually promiscuous and drug-addicted party girl? He’d lived most of his life with Mariella and Harrison, twenty-three of his thirty-three years, and in all ways he considered them his parents. Ana was just his incubator. But when a prominent couple, California royalty, took on a child that was not their own, tongues wagged and turned vicious. He was called the “Marshall outsider,”

  “the other one” or “the poor relative.” Two degrees in business, working his ass off, and California society still thought that the Marshalls were practicing nepotism by employing him.

  Gabe rolled his shoulders, trying to dislodge the massive chip on his shoulder. Annoyed with himself, he slapped his broad hand on the door leading to the ICU and pushed Elana ahead of him. The waiting room, as he quickly noticed, was empty.

  “Where are they? Where are my mother and my brothers? Joe?” Her face suffused with color, and tears shimmered in her big round eyes. Elana lifted her fingers to her mouth. �
��Oh, God, is Daddy dead?”

  Acquire, assess, act. It was one of Harrison’s favorite quotes. Gabe tried to swallow, conscious of the lump in his throat. Harrison was the only father he had, and he couldn’t be dead. He wouldn’t allow that. “Take a breath, Elana, and let’s ask. Don’t make assumptions.”

  “My father is in ICU, my family is not here and you can’t tell me how to feel!”

  I’m your family, too, Gabe wanted to point out, and I’m trying to help, dammit. But, as he well knew, there was no reasoning with Elana when she was upset. He glanced at the nurses’ station and cursed when he saw that it was empty. Walking toward the second set of doors leading to the ward, he looked through the high windows set into the door and noticed that the nurses were hovering around a bed on the far side of the wall. Judging by the pretty toes he could see, the patient they were working on was not Harrison. He turned back to Elana and issued a terse instruction. “You call your brothers, and I’ll call Mariella. Maybe, between us, we can find out what the hell is going on.”

  Elana nodded and pulled her bag off her shoulder to look for her cell phone.

  “Elana?” Gabe waited until she met his eyes before speaking again. “I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise. I won’t let the family down.”

  * * *

  Elana held Gabe’s eyes and slowly nodded as her panic receded. When Gabe looked at her like that, with those deep, serious eyes, wearing his I’ve-got-this expression, she knew she could take his word to the bank. He would do exactly what he said. Jarrod was hot fire and Thom quiet, steady rain, but Gabe was the solid rock beneath her feet.

  Thom, hell. Elana looked down at her screen and saw his missed calls. She could imagine him running his hands over his face, a frown between his strong eyebrows. If she called Thom, he would pepper her with questions she didn’t have answers for, would question where she’d been and why she wasn’t picking up. Talking to him would be like pouring another layer of guilt onto the mountain she already carried around, and that load threatened to break her, mentally and physically. Jarrod was so much easier to talk to—his comme ci, comme ça attitude could be annoying, but he was uncomplicated. Jarrod was shallow, and right now, she needed shallow. It allowed her a place to escape, the freedom not to feel.

  Sometimes, she would do anything not to feel. All her life she’d run away from situations and conflicts, choosing to flee rather than feel, deal. She’d run to Thom when she couldn’t cope with whatever was happening at home—her parents fighting, Rafe and Luc sniping at each other and taunting Gabe. As an adult she turned to Gabe to solve her work conflicts, to Thom when she needed a comforting ear and endless support, and to Jarrod when she wanted to escape.

  She did a lot of running, a lot of avoiding, and Elana knew that it was a flaw she needed to address. The problem was that it was so much easier not to. Swimming at the shallow end of the pond, not putting in the effort, avoiding depths and currents, was a lot easier than wading into deeper waters. Besides, her father was dying, her family was falling apart and the renovation of Elana Marshall into a better version of herself could wait until this blew over. While she waited for more information, she could seek comfort. She could also choose to escape.

  Door number one or door number two?

  Elana glanced at Gabe and saw that he was involved in a tense conversation. She quickly moved away, her thumb hitting a much-dialed contact on her phone.

  “Hey, it’s me...”

  * * *

  Technology, the Fixer thought, was awesome, and God bless those brainy nerds who developed the ability to combine ones and zeros and somehow convert those numbers into a live video and audio feed. The Fixer didn’t know how it happened but was grateful that it did. It made life so much easier.

  Sitting in the expensive vehicle in the parking lot of El Acantilado, Harrison’s flagship restaurant, The Fixer stared down at the cell phone screen, eyes bouncing between the six tiny images on the phone. Touching the first screen, the picture zoomed in to reveal live footage of the helicopter carrying Harrison landing on the roof of Whispering Oaks, an isolated private clinic just outside Malibu. To the Fixer’s untrained eyes, Harrison’s transfer from the helicopter to roof and then into the elevator was as smooth as silk. After the helicopter took off, the Fixer closed that screen, enlarged another and watched the team push Harrison’s bed down a corridor lined with fine art. To those who didn’t pay attention, the clinic looked like a boutique hotel or an exquisitely decorated private residence. The grounds had been planned by a top landscape designer. There were two pools, one heated and one not, a gym and a massage room. There was a cozy library, a billiards room, various reception rooms. And that was the point—this was a new type of medical facility, where the patients could, if they had enough money and were healthy enough to do so, pretend that they were on vacation at a country house.

  The medical staff moved Harrison into his room, and the Fixer watched as they did their thing. They operated as a well-oiled machine and the Fixer nodded, appreciative of well-oiled machines; it was, after all, the way the Fixer and Harrison ran their not-so-legal business.

  It had started innocently enough, as a favor for a friend. Harrison’s school friend, a Californian politician running for the Senate, colored outside the lines with a woman who was not his social equal, and that liaison resulted in an illegitimate child. Harrison acted as the intermediary, negotiating silence and a move across the country, to where Harrison was conveniently building a new restaurant, by offering a vast amount of money and a change of identity. Harrison then helped one of his most talented chefs escape a drug charge by offering the investigating officer a deep-sea fishing trip on The Mariella, his state-of-the-art yacht. When a prominent stockbroker’s daughter was found on a tourist beach, sky-high, naked and in the arms of an equally naked, very underage teenage boy, Harrison fished her out of jail before the press latched onto that juicy story. Harrison saw his actions as helping out his friends; it was the Fixer who saw the economic potential of his benevolent interference.

  The Fixer’s instinct had been proven correct, and they had the bank balances to prove it. Extricating the great and not-so-good of American society out of sticky situations proved to be a lot more lucrative than either of them could have imagined.

  Harrison’s initial skepticism about their second business had been unfounded. He was a chef and a businessman, but the power appealed to him—Harrison liked feeling involved. Harrison didn’t care about the money their sideline generated—he had enough to last him several lifetimes—but he liked having the leverage, the inside knowledge, the ability to, if necessary, affect an outcome because someone owed him something. Could that be the reason he was lying in a coma, holding on by the medical thread of tubes and machines?

  “Monitor the Captain very closely over the next hour. I want to know if anything, the slightest thing, changes.”

  The Fixer heard Dr. Malone’s instruction, his voice filling the car through the top-of-the-line Bose speakers. Dr. Malone left the room, and the nurse scribbled on Harrison’s chart. Zooming in again, the words she wrote became clearer: “Patient stable, no discernible change in condition. Seems unaffected by transfer from St. Aloysius. Instructions to monitor closely for next hour.”

  Good. The Fixer reduced the size of the screen and watched as the nurse left the room, leaving Harrison to lie there on his own. The Fixer frowned, wondering whether the move to Whispering Oaks was the correct one. It didn’t matter—it was the only card to play. The private hospital was specially designed for situations such as these, for patients who needed specialized care and ultimate privacy. The world would be shocked to realize who’d actually passed through the clinic’s doors: presidents, oil sheikhs, foreign dignitaries, dictators and divas had all sought help here. They’d been treated for everything ranging from depression to life-threatening conditions as bad, or worse, than Harrison’s. The
Fixer had used the clinic before to treat a charismatic clergyman-turned-senator who suffered from a recurring bout of syphilis.

  It had taken some quick maneuvering to clear the clinic so that Harrison was the only patient. Luckily, there had been only two patients in residence; one was discharged and the other was transferred to another facility, the Fixer arranging it so that only the most trusted and long-serving of the staff remained on the premises to care for the man they’d been instructed to call the Captain.

  There were security cameras in each room, and it had been a breeze to hack into the clinic’s system and hijack the feed. The Fixer had eyes and ears on Harrison and, very importantly, on every visitor he received.

  It was eavesdropping on steroids. But, as the Fixer had learned a long time ago, information was power, and it could be obtained by any means possible. Thanks to these tiny cameras, the Fixer would be the first to know Harrison’s status, whether he was stirring, awake or, frankly, dead. The Fixer idly wondered if Harrison would come around, and if he did, what he would say. Would he be lucid? Would he remember the events leading up to the crash? Would he be confused, clear minded, brain damaged? There were so many ifs and buts and uncertainties, and that left far too much to go wrong. The hidden cameras provided much-needed extra minutes. Being notified of Harrison’s condition could mean the difference between success and disaster, freedom and jail, life and death.

  Those minutes gave the Fixer time to maneuver, to plot, to put safeguards, barriers and smoke screens in place. They were a safety net, an air pocket in a sinking ship.