but I am a goddamn judge. You will respect that and me.”
Lucien watched as Nathaniel moved into his father’s space so that they were eye to eye. “You’ve spent most of my life calling my wife a whore because you couldn’t keep it in your pants and seduced a fucking college freshman. Was the constant reminder that you didn’t actually walk on water the reason you took your failings out on my wife?”
“What the hell do you care? You didn’t love her,” the judge snapped.
“No, but I liked her and I liked Elizabeth. She was a good kid and didn’t deserve—” Lucien watched as Nathaniel ended his point in midsentence and then he walked away as if in a hurry to go. Lucien stepped farther into the shadows as he passed. The judge wouldn’t see it, but Lucien did, the smile that spread over Nathaniel’s face. And Lucien felt a begrudging admiration for Horace and Nathaniel Carmichael at their perfectly executed setup.
Horace was just finishing the paperwork for his father’s indictment when his secretary buzzed him.
“Your four o’clock is here.”
“Send him in.” Horace stood and walked to the cabinet at the far end of his office and poured himself a Scotch. After his brother’s visit to their father a few weeks ago, the old man had contacted the Grimaldi family, trying to take a hit out on Nathaniel. As bizarre as his father’s actions had been, what was even more disturbing to Horace was that in his gut, he’d known what his father would try to do. Horace had made a deal with Pasquale Grimaldi, the lesser of the two evils, to make the case against his father.
The door opened and he drank the entire contents of his glass before he turned to his visitor.
“Thank you for coming.”
“I’m a little unsure why I was asked here,” Lucien said as he stood near the door, unwilling to come in any farther. He’d been here once already and wasn’t thrilled to find himself here again. DA’s offices made him nervous.
“This is not an official meeting.”
Lucien relaxed a bit, but he still didn’t move farther into the room.
“Will you have a seat?”
“No, I’m good here.”
“Suit yourself. I asked you here because I have some information that I need to share with you.”
Lucien wasn’t sure he liked where this was going. “All right.”
“It’s amazing how many lives were altered because of the weekend of Nathanial’s engagement party. Belinda was only a sophomore in college when she was told she was to marry my brother. Nathaniel’s a good guy, but he’s not husband material. Belinda seemed scared and rebellious. I couldn’t blame her. That same weekend I learned that the woman I wanted to marry wouldn’t have me. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, but marriage would force her to give up her calling. She’d debated about it for over a year and I really thought I was wearing her down, but she decided that she couldn’t. I was devastated because I loved her—still do.”
He turned to Lucien. “You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all of this. I’ll get to the point. That weekend, Belinda and I shared our pain by sleeping together. It was only one time and we knew it was a mistake as soon as we had. We vowed to never mention it and she went back to college.”
He looked down as if the next words were almost too hard to say. “I didn’t realize there was a child, not until almost three years later. Belinda was getting ready to marry my brother. She couldn’t show up with a child from a brief affair she had with me, and her sister wasn’t prepared to care for a child on her own.”
He looked at Lucien, who was pacing because he was being bombarded with emotions he was unaccustomed to feeling. Lucien knew his voice reflected his internal turmoil when he said, “Go on.”
“I went for the baby because I wanted him. I had a son. I had planned to bring him home and raise him, but then my father learned of him. He went crazy, vowing all kinds of retribution, and I knew even then that he was capable of anything. So I took my son to the one place where I knew he would be loved, where I trusted the one who would be looking out for him. I took him to the one person who would love him as if he were her own, the woman who couldn’t marry