No Good Deed - Marie Sexton Page 0,48

them a knowing smirk, as if they’d been caught doing something naughty.

“Nothing,” Charlie said.

“Is there anybody else in the house?” Murphy asked.

“No.”

“I’m going to need the two of you to sit right here while we search. You’re not to leave this room.”

Jonas pointed to the bedroom. “Can I get my glasses first?”

Murphy turned to Lazy. “Go with him. Make sure that’s all he’s doing.” Murphy grinned at Charlie, his dark eyes glinting in triumph. “I’m sure this is a real shock for you. Must suck now that your buddy Andino can’t protect you anymore.”

Charlie said nothing. He did his best to look like he had nothing in the world to worry about. Jonas joined him on the couch, wearing his quirky glasses but no matching smile. He watched Charlie, a hundred questions in his eyes, but Charlie wasn’t about to answer them now.

“It’ll be all right,” he said, hoping like hell it was true.

Cocky yelled from down the hall, “We got something here, Murph.”

He’d found the exam room. That was fine. There was nothing there that could get Charlie in trouble. Sure, it was unusual to have a blood pressure cuff on the wall and a full-sized exam table, but there was nothing illegal about it. It was only illegal if he charged people, which he never did.

And if he gave out prescription drugs. But they’d only find those if they found the safe hidden behind the shower wall.

He sat, silently fuming as they tore his exam room apart. Not that he could see it, but he could tell by the commotion that they weren’t being gentle. That was the logical place to look, and they spent a long time there before moving on. They searched the kitchen and the living room. They eventually moved to his bedroom. He heard them chuckling when they found the armoire and its contents. The word “fags” reached his ears, loud and clear. Charlie would have bet every dollar to his name it came from Cocky.

To hell with him. Charlie was long past the point of being embarrassed by his sexuality or his kink. He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe, trying to stop the worry, because it did no good. He waited for them to crow in triumph when they found the safe. The warrant would mean he was obligated to open it for them. And if he did that, his life would take a rather unpleasant turn.

Next to him, Jonas fretted, sitting on his hands to keep from biting his nails. “I wish I had my sketch pad,” he mumbled to Charlie. “At least then I could doodle.”

Gray had been telling Charlie for years he was asking for trouble, but Charlie had never even considered shutting down his clinic. In a strange way, it all went back to his mother, and the father he’d never known. At twenty, Rosa had been a maid for a wealthy, white family. It was a tale older than time, the rich boy and the maid. A sad, made-for-TV cliché, but it probably hadn’t felt that way to his mother. When she told her lover about her pregnancy, he’d offered money for an abortion. But Rosa had been raised Catholic. Maybe her religious beliefs hadn’t kept her from losing her virginity, but they certainly meant an abortion was out of the question.

That might have been the end of the story, except that Charlie’s abuela had been a fierce, smart, resourceful woman. She’d found a lawyer and threatened to sue for paternity. The family had been horrified, not because their son had knocked up a girl. After all, boys would be boys. They were bound to sow their oats and all that. But the fact that he’d chosen a lower-class Mexican girl and not one of their own had been a horror too great to face. And so they’d done what rich families traditionally did in these types of situations—they’d written a big, fat check to make it all go away.

Charlie never asked who the family was. He didn’t care. But his abuela had done a lot of research after receiving the money and had invested wisely. By the time Charlie inherited, the account held almost a million dollars.

Not that Charlie felt like a millionaire. In his twenties, he’d splurged and used a small chunk of it to buy his first Harley, but he’d felt guilty afterward. That money felt more like his abuela’s than his, and she’d taught him to be frugal. After that, he’d