Fatal Secrets - Desiree Holt
Prologue
The men sat in the living room of the hunting lodge, each with a glass filled with Old Rip Van Winkle twenty-five-year-old Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. It sold for somewhere north of twenty thousand dollars a bottle, but the man who liked to call himself Baron, because one of his ancestors had held that title, could afford a closetful. He took a slow sip of the rich-tasting liquid, letting it slide slowly down his throat. If he couldn’t solve his problem, not even a full bottle would be able to help.
He looked at the man sitting in the big armchair across from him, also with a glass of the whiskey.
“I thought we were done with this.”
“We were.” The man known to only his very closest associates as Verne—a fraternity nickname from his college days—took a swallow of his own drink. “It’s been ten years, for god’s sake. Who thought someone would decide to dig it up again?”
“We all should have been prepared. Zoe Ward was a pain in the ass when it happened, and she’s turning out to be even more of one now. It’s obvious she never let this go.”
The man known as Mac, standing at the bar pouring his own drink, grunted.
“I said that from day one. If we’d arranged an ‘accident’ when she first brought this up, no one would be the wiser, and there wouldn’t have been a stink. Now, it’s all coming back to haunt us because that fucking reporter is writing a book about it.”
“Maybe someone could lose the files and we’d be done with it,” Mac suggested.
“Get real,” Verne snorted. “It was hard enough the first time around. This time, people would be on the alert, and there’d be questions.”
“Go figure someone would care that much about a fucking paralegal, after all this time,” Baron snapped. “I don’tcare how you do it but get it done.”
“Or I will,” Mac told them.
“No.” Verne drained the rest of his drink and poured another. “Just scare the shit out of her. Don’t leave any traces. I know she’s a stubborn bitch, but everyone has a trigger. Find hers and frighten her enough she drops this altogether.”
“And exactly how the fuck are we supposed to do that?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Mac told then. “We don’t have a choice. And we’d better do it before we leave here, or we’re all in a shitload of trouble.”
“Don’t forget she’s now got that SEAL with her attached at the hip,” Verne pointed out. “You can’t go around eliminating veterans, especially decorated ones. The publicity will kill us as much as anything else.”
“How about a double accident? That is plausible,” Mac said at last.
“As I pointed out, killing her is going to raise more questions than we want to deal with. Maybe killing her isn’t the answer. If she doesn’t scare away, maybe putting her out of commission for a while would work.”
“It would have to not raise any questions.”
“Leave it to me. I’m the expert here. I’ll figure it out and get someone on it.”
Baron looked around at the other two. “We can’t meet to discuss this again.”
Verne nodded. “You and I can’t be anywhere around this. We won’t get together like this again. But it better get taken care of before we’re all destroyed.”
He tossed back the rest of his bourbon, wondering if they were close to that precipice anyway. If this didn’t get taken care of, he was going to lose everything he’d worked so hard for, and that was not at all acceptable.
Chapter 1
I wish the damn rain would stop.
To Zoe Young it seemed as if it had been raining forever, at least here in Helena, Montana. For the past three days, she’d been dodging raindrops—and sometimes getting soaked—while squeezing in interviews to finish a story she’d promised her editor she’d see through. It was the least she could do when he’d agreed to give her the time off so she could work on her latest book.
That book was her real reason for being in Helena. The book that had become the center of her whole life. An obsession, her editor called it. Maybe he was right. It certainly had played havoc with her social life for the past ten years. Guys apparently lost the urge to connect with her in any way when she launched into her passionate soliloquy about Justine DeLuca’s death. Murder. The subject certainly was a killer. Killer. Ha ha. If it weren’t for her fun toys, she’d have no sex life at all.
Everyone