Tara Taylor Quinn - Love By Association

In the olden days Julie would have been all over protecting him from that particular worm.

“So are the Smyths.”

He hadn’t heard, or he wouldn’t have asked Julie to accompany him. He was surprised actually. Smyth wasn’t a big supporter of the arts.

But that was that. As desperately as Colin wished his little sister could move on, he also understood why she couldn’t. In the ten years since David Smyth had gotten away with brutally raping her at a party, Julie had not seen him. Even from a distance. She’d refused to be anywhere that either David Jr. or his father, David Sr.—owner of one of the last family banks in the state—were in attendance.

In spite of the fact that that meant she was cut off from much of the social circle in which she’d grown up and thrived.

Not to mention losing the close relationship she’d had with Margaret Smyth, David Jr.’s mother.

With David Sr. being their father Michael’s closest friend, they’d all grown up together. When Colin and Julie’s mother had died, Margaret Smyth had been like a mother to them...

“Jaime told me they were on the confirmed guest list.”

Julie’s friend from grade school who’d moved to New York before high school, Jaime Mendonthol, had a couple of paintings in the evening’s fundraising auction. She was in town, and the two women had met for lunch the day before.

Jaime had been the reason Colin had been so hopeful that his sister would agree to the night out. Missing Jaime’s local show would be hard on her.

“I knew, anyway. Leslie Morrison sent me the guest list.”

Leslie Morrison, wife of James Morrison, owner and CEO of Morrison Textiles—a third-generation company that had been using Fairbanks and Fairbanks as lead counsel for more than seventy-five years—was, as far as Colin knew, the only person in their circle who knew what had happened to Julie the night that David Smyth slipped a drug into her drink and then proceeded to sexually violate her in every way possible.

Most people knew of, or had heard rumor of, a liaison gone bad between the two of them. But word among “friends” was that their sexual relations the night of the party had been consensual.

“Friends” including Santa Raquel’s esteemed police commissioner.

When it had become clear that Julie wasn’t going to get justice—due in large part to a law enforcement system that was willing to look away if the right money was involved—she’d begged Colin to keep the incident a secret. To preserve as much of the life she’d led as she could. He’d wanted to move, leave the country, even. Start over in Italy or someplace else beautiful enough to distract his little sister from the horror she wasn’t ever going to completely escape.

Julie was the one who’d convinced him they needed to stay home. Pointing out, rightly so, that a lot of people depended on Fairbanks and Fairbanks, trusted them, in a world where having an attorney in business was an absolute must. Pointing out, as well, that if he closed the firm, they’d not only put a couple dozen attorneys and more than a hundred support staff out of jobs, but they’d lose the income necessary to keep their family home on the California coast—a home their grandfather had built from scratch.

Why Leslie Morrison kept the secret, Colin didn’t know. Nor did he know, for sure, how she’d known what had happened. He’d just come home from law school one day, shortly after that horrible night, a twenty-one-year-old kid trying to raise his sister after their father’s heart attack the year before and their mother’s death from hepatitis the year before that, and found Leslie and Julie sitting on the couch.

Not all that unusual, seeing that Leslie chaired the county’s Pet Adoption and Rescue Fund, a charitable fund that raised much of the money that helped support more than twenty shelters and neutering programs in a thirty-mile radius along the coast. Julie had run for and won election to junior chair of the fund her sophomore year in high school.

She’d been sitting on the committee’s board ever since. Now with a college degree in finance, Julie was also part of the Sunshine Children’s League—which raised funds for children without families, providing funding for basic necessities but also some scholarships to California state universities.

She attended luncheons and organized fundraisers. She shopped at the stores she loved and occasionally went to dinner with a girlfriend or two.

But she didn’t date. She never frequented dinner establishments where she might run into a Smyth. She hadn’t been back to Santa Barbara—home to the Smyth mansion where the rape had taken place—in ten years.

And she almost never attended evening social functions.

Colin gave up trying to change her mind that night.

* * *

FROM THE MINUTE she walked into the glitzy ballroom Thursday night, Chantel changed. As though she’d been born to wealth, her persona slid over her, oozing a confidence that surprised her as she entered the elegant party in the five-star resort on the Pacific coastline.

For that night she was a woman of privilege. And she was a woman on the prowl. Not unlike most of the unattached—and probably some of the attached, as well—women there. But unlike the rest of her unlikely peers, Chantel, while prowling for a man, wasn’t there for personal gain. She wanted to pick up a man as badly as any of them. Maybe worse.

But she wasn’t hoping he’d take her home. To the contrary. She wanted him locked up in an eight-by-eight cell, where she knew he’d never be able to hurt his wife again. Picturing the key to the cell flying through the air and landing in the ocean beyond the wall of windows at one end of the elegantly appointed room, Chantel sent a silent promise to Ryder Morrison that he wasn’t going to spend the next several years watching his father beat up his mother. Or living in fear that his father would someday come after him with a baseball bat as he had his own little brother so many years before.

Not that arresting the man would guarantee that. They needed to build a case against him, find ample enough proof that no matter who came to the powerful man’s rescue, the prosecutor could still win a conviction.

It wouldn’t be easy. James Morrison was a respected and very rich man who’d funded many of the seated politicians in California’s congress. He probably had blackmail goods on others.

And that was where she came in. With her blond hair curling over her breasts, the ample cleavage that was visible in the V of the black, figure-hugging and glittering gown she’d worn for her debut evening as the daughter of an East Coast millionaire newly settling in California, Chantel remembered the mantra that Wayne had been repeating almost hourly the week since they’d won approval for this sting.

Patience.

“Undercover work isn’t about going in and getting it done,” he’d told her. “It’s about taking the time to become intimate with the life you’re infiltrating.”

Used to being the one who bulldozed ahead and made things happen, Chantel paused just inside the door of the richly decorated room. She’d passed her first test—handing off her invitation at the door.

Gleaned from the police commissioner himself. A man she’d never met, a man who wouldn’t be acknowledging her presence that night—though he would surely be there, even if just to put in an appearance.

He’d agreed to the sting, wanted her to get Morrison if he turned out to be guilty of beating up his wife.

But he was expecting Chantel to clear the textile magnate’s name. Morrison and Commissioner Paul Reynolds were golf buddies. They went way back.

Or so she’d been told.

Still, she couldn’t know the commissioner. Not newly arrived from upstate New York as she was.