Mike came to stand in front of her, his face hardening as he obviously made his decision. “I’m sorry, Annabelle. I don’t want to do this, but I’m on parole. He works for people who can send me back to jail. I can’t go back. Give him what he wants. Please.”
Mike walked away, his footsteps heavy on the stairs.
Gates got in her face. “I want the list, bitch.”
Belle’s brain went straight back to her first night in the house. She’d found a weird list written by two different hands in the desk, along with her grandmother’s journal, in some sort of hiding place. She’d taken the journal, but put the list back because it had seemed like nonsense at the time. It was very likely some sort of code written by Grandma and Karen Ehlers. Their client list? She wasn’t sure, but that seemed likely, given how badly Gates wanted it.
Her grandmother and Karen Ehlers would need some way to keep track of their transactions. Maybe they’d even dealt in information as well as pleasure. According to the news, Ehlers had decided to write a tell-all book. To ensure her retirement? Had someone learned of her plans and silenced her for good?
“What list?” She couldn’t let on that she knew where to find it. Play dumb. Buy yourself time.
Gates slapped her face. A hard crack rent the air before the pain bloomed in her cheek. Belle bit back a groan because her skin was on fire—and not in a nice way. The difference between violence and what her men shared with her was massive. They were careful to bring her up to the edge of pain. Gates just wanted to torture her.
“Give me what I want or it gets worse from here.” Gates smacked her again, and she couldn’t stop her startled gasp. “Your grandmother started a list of clients, then sold it to Karen Ehlers with the business. I have every reason to believe it’s in this house. I want it now.”
She cupped her hot cheek. “Why would it be here?”
“Because Ehlers told me she gave it to Marie before she died. Your grandmother was her momma whore. When Karen got worried about her safety, she hid it here, a sort of insurance policy. You might have heard that Karen had decided to write an exposé. She thought that list would ensure that no one came after her, a sort of mutually assured destruction. She promised not to use real names, but everyone would have figured out her clients’ identities.”
Belle shrank back. “I don’t know anything about it. I only met my grandmother once, when I was a child. We didn’t keep in touch. I was surprised she wrote me into her will at all.”
Gates frowned. “But you’ve been living here. You must have seen something. I found a draft of that Ehlers bitch’s actual manuscript. She’d written the part that identified her clients and their sexual preferences in code, based on that list. I destroyed the manuscript and all the electronic copies of it I could find. I need to do the same with that fucking list. The elite of New Orleans are on it, and being exposed would ruin them.”
Belle wasn’t so sure about that. New Orleans wasn’t exactly known for being uptight and prudish, but Gates clearly wasn’t willing to take any chances.
And that was when she remembered the camera.
If she could trip the motion detector, at least she could capture her attackers on video and they would be identified. They wouldn’t get away with murder. And leading them upstairs would take them further away from Tate. She had no idea how long it would take him to metabolize the drug, but she didn’t like that gun being so close to his helpless form.
“I haven’t found anything like a list.” The minute she gave it up, they were both dead. She couldn’t imagine how Eric and Kellan would cope if they had to walk into this house and find her body, along with Tate’s. They would be devastated. She had to fight for every second.
“Well, that is very bad for you,” Gates snarled, raising another hand to her.
She raised her hands to ward him off. “But I haven’t searched her bedroom.”
Gates’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been sleeping there.”
She shook her head. “No. Not since the first couple of nights. I moved into one of the smaller rooms because I couldn’t sleep in the master. I heard voices.”
Gates chuckled, a nasty sound. “Yes, I had Mike set an audio device in the ceiling above the bed. It was tripped after the light was off and the room went still. The device would whisper when you were asleep and turn off the minute you moved. It was supposed to make you want to move.”
Clever, but she would try to use it to her advantage. “It scared me. I didn’t like to go into that room, but I know my grandmother kept a lot of very personal things in there.”
She’d found pictures and a box of little keepsakes. The closest was big, and Belle hadn’t even started to clean it out yet. There were storage boxes under the bed, as well. With any luck, she could keep them upstairs and searching for a very long time.
Gates nodded toward Helena. “You look through the office and the library. I’ll take her upstairs. Don’t make a mess. Our scenario is not a burglary. The last thing I need is for the cops to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb.”
Helena let her go, obviously secure in the fact that Belle had another gun pointed straight at her chest. “I thought you had your interns looking through there last week.”
So that’s why he’d insisted on “taking inventory” of everything in the house. They might have looked through drawers and rifled through closets, but they had obviously missed her grandmother’s hidey-hole.
“I couldn’t actually tell them what I wanted them to find. I told them to bring me anything that looked like personal notes because Marie Wright might have jotted additional instructions about the division of her estate. Of course, the idiots didn’t find anything. Start looking for hidden compartments,” he instructed Helena. “Wright was a whore for a long time. She ran a brothel herself. She knows how to keep a secret.”
“What about him?” Helena frowned as she looked toward Tate’s body.
Gates waved off the worry. “He’ll be out for hours. Don’t worry about him.”
As her grandmother’s lawyer marched her up the stairs, Belle prayed Tate had the chance to wake up again.
* * * *
Kellan shuffled along the sidewalk, wondering if he was doing the right thing. It might be best if he just walked away. Belle needed a man who had a whole heart to give her, and he wasn’t sure he’d even been born with one.
Fucking coward. Eric’s right. You like things easy. You like not having to open yourself up. You’re so fucking scared, you’re going to let the best thing that ever happened to you slip through your fingers.
He might not have been born with a whole heart, but his inner voice seemed to be totally intact and brutally honest.
Eric stopped at the small gate that separated the courtyard from the street. The moon had come out, washing the brick in a silvery glow. He never noticed the moon in Chicago. Somehow it seemed bigger in New Orleans. The air felt heavier, almost mysterious, but there was a sweetness to it. And the heat seemed to seep into his bones, drugging him until all he wanted was to toss off his clothes and be naked with Belle. If he stripped down, past his clothes, past his skin, if he offered her every piece of himself, would it be enough? Could Belle heal that essential piece of him that had been damaged for so long? He’d long thought that a part of him was missing, but now he wondered if maybe what he’d always been missing was Belle herself. What if that crap about soul mates was true and he wouldn’t ever feel whole without her?
The thought of her holding a baby conceived from their love did weird things to him. His gut tightened and turned, then did a little dip that didn’t feel at all like anxiety. It felt more like anticipation. Hope.