Sandra Marton - Raising The Stakes

In her heart, she’d always known it would come to this, that she would have to take her child and run for his life and for hers.

She was leaving the monster she’d married and she was never, ever coming back.

CHAPTER ONE

Four years later:

GRAHAM BARON stepped out of the terminal at the Austin airport and wondered how he’d ever survived spending the first seventeen years of his life in Texas. He was thirty-three and lived in New York now but whenever he came back here, the fact that he’d been born in this place always surprised him. It all seemed alien. The people. Their lazy drawls. The vastness of land and sky. The weather.

Oh, yeah, he thought, the weather, as the heat washed over him like an open furnace. And it wasn’t really summer. Of course, there were those who said this wasn’t really Texas, either. The guidebooks called the area hill country. So did people back East.

“Are you really from Texas?” somebody would say, if the subject of his birthplace came up.

“Yup,” he’d reply, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops and putting on a John Wayne drawl, “ah surely am.”

It always got a laugh, considering that he had no accent, didn’t wear cowboy boots and had washed away the stink of oil, cattle and horses sixteen long years ago.

“Where in Texas?” they’d ask. And when Gray said he’d been born in Austin, someone would nod wisely and say, Austin, huh? Wasn’t that, like, different? Weren’t there green trees and rolling hills in Austin? It wasn’t really the same as the rest of the state, right?

Like hell it wasn’t, Gray thought as he put down his briefcase, peeled off his suit jacket, loosened his tie and rolled back his shirtsleeves. A man accustomed to a soaring Manhattan skyline had little use for the puny imitation of this one, and the hills of Central Park rolled as much as the land around here.

Dammit, he was in a rotten mood. For what had to be the hundredth time since he’d boarded the plane at La Guardia this morning, he wished he hadn’t let himself get talked into making this trip…but he had. What was that old saying? Curiosity killed the cat. In his case, it had put him on a 6:00 a.m. flight to Texas.

A horn beeped at the curb. Gray looked over, saw a dark green Jeep with the Espada longhorns painted on the door. Abel Jones waved a hand. Gray waved back and trotted over.

“Nice of you to pick me up,” he said as he got into the seat beside Abel and dumped his briefcase in the back.

Abel gave him a long look, then spat out the window and pulled into traffic. “Jes’ part of the job,” he said laconically.

So much for conversation. Not that Gray was surprised. Jonas Baron’s foreman was a lot like the old man himself. Tall, spare, seemingly ageless, and not given to small talk. Well, that was fine. Gray wasn’t much interested in conversation. He sat back, let the coolness of the air-conditioning wash over him as they made their way out of the airport and onto the highway that led from the city to the town of Brazos Springs, and tried to figure out what his uncle could possibly want.

Jonas had phoned late last night. The call had drawn Gray from the kind of deep sleep that came of having a woman lying warm and sated in his arms. The woman, someone he’d been seeing for several weeks, murmured a soft complaint as he rolled away from her and reached for the telephone, an automatic reaction that came of eight years of practicing criminal law.

You got a lot of middle of the night calls, when your clients weren’t exactly the salt of the earth.

“Gray Baron,” he said hoarsely.

The voice that responded was one he hadn’t heard in a long time, an easy Texas drawl laid over a whip-sharp tone of command.

“Graham?”

“Jonas?” Gray peered at the lighted dial on his alarm clock, then sat up against the pillows. “What’s happened?”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with your old man, if that’s what you mean. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with nobody you care about, so you can relax.”

“Gray?” the woman beside him murmured. “What’s the matter?”

That was what he was trying to figure out. He reached back, smoothed his hand over her warm skin. Telephone at his ear, he got to his feet and walked, naked, from the bedroom.

“What’s that supposed to mean? That there’s nothing wrong with anybody I care about?”

“It’s jes’ a statement, boy. No need to try and parse it.” There was a brief pause. “I guess you’re wonderin’ why I’m callin’ so late.”

“You guessed right,” Gray said dryly.

“What time is it there, anyways? Midnight?”

“It’s almost two. What’s up, Jonas?”

There was another silence. “I just, uh, I just thought…I thought that we ain’t seen you in these parts for a while.”

Jesus, Gray thought, his uncle had finally gone senile. “No,” he said carefully, “you haven’t.”

“Not since Samantha married that Dee-mee-tree-ose guy,” Jonas said, turning the Greek name of his stepdaughter’s husband into pure Texas.

Forget senile. The old man still had a mind like a steel trap. “So?”

“So…” More silence, then the sound of Jonas clearing his throat. “So, I wondered if you might be in the mood to pop down for a visit.”

“Let me get this straight,” Gray said carefully. “You phoned in the middle of the night to invite me to Espada?”

The old man chuckled. “You don’t buy that, huh?”

“No.” Gray walked through his dark apartment to the kitchen, tucked the phone against his shoulder and opened the refrigerator. He took out a bottle of mineral water, unscrewed the top and lifted it to his lips. “Hell, no,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did you really think I would?”

“That’s what I like about you, boy. You ain’t like some people. You don’t believe in treatin’ me like I was God.”

Gray laughed. What his uncle meant was that he didn’t like the old man and he’d never pretended otherwise. He’d never toadied up to the Baron money the way his father did. Jonas whistled; Leighton came running. It had always been like that, all the years Gray was growing up. Sometimes he’d been hard-pressed to know which of the men he despised more, his father for sucking up or Jonas for wallowing in the pleasure of it. After a while, he hadn’t bothered giving it much thought. All that mattered was that he hadn’t done the same thing. He’d thumbed his nose at both of them and at a system that should have died out in the middle ages, and made his own way in the world.

“No,” he said bluntly, “I don’t.” He put the bottle on the counter and made his way back toward the bedroom. “Look, Jonas, let’s cut the crap, okay? It’s the middle of the night. This is the first time you’ve ever phoned me. Come to think of it, this might just be the first time you’ve said more than three words in a row to me.”

“Or you to me, boy.”

“Absolutely. So, why would you expect me to buy into the idea that you called to invite me down for the weekend? Get to the bottom line. What’s the deal?”

Another of those pauses hummed over the phone. Gray could hear the rasp of the old man’s breath.

“You’re some kinda hotshot lawyer up there in New York, ain’t you?”

Was he? He was a partner in a prestigious firm, but did hotshot lawyers spend their days putting the scum of the earth back on the streets?

“I’m a lawyer, licensed to practice in the state of New York,” Gray said brusquely.

“Well, I got a legal matter needs tendin’.”

“A legal matter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why come to me? For starters, I’m not licensed to practice in Texas.”

“Don’t need you to practice. Maybe I should have said what I need is legal advice.”