Tara Quinn - Hidden

He didn’t have to hit her over the head with it. She got it. All the way through to the vulnerable little girl lurking inside her, hoping against hope to somehow find unconditional love.

“Of course not for me.” She had no idea where she found the strength to sound so normal. “We have an understanding, buster,” she said, grabbing his hand, squeezing it. “No strings attached. No expectations. Today, but no promise of tomorrow. Remember?”

She hated it. Every word. But it was only under those circumstances that she could stay.

Face solemn, he studied her for long seconds while she held her breath. And then he nodded.

“Just so you aren’t hoping for more,” he said.

“I’m not.” Not in any way that could ever matter. Not now. Not with Leah missing and her heart still so raw and hurting for Scott and everything he’d told her that day. Not while she was suffering her own guilt for the lies she was telling. So she did the only thing that felt right, the only thing that had the power to dispel the darkness. She pulled his head toward hers and lost herself in a kiss that stirred every nerve in her body until there was no coherent thought left other than to assuage the ache between her legs.

And the hardness between his.

T hursday morning brought more bad news. Senator Thomas Whitehead sat behind his mahogany glass-topped desk, hands steepled at his chin as he faced the best defense attorney on his team, Kilgore Douglas. Thomas still maintained a penthouse office at the downtown San Francisco high-rise that housed the law firm he owned—although he no longer practiced there.

“Kassar found reasonable grounds to issue search warrants.” Kilgore came right to the point after announcing that he’d just heard from Detectives Stanton and Gregory.

Judge Henry Kassar. Democrat. Openly opposed to every Republican branch in Thomas’s family tree.

Sharp pain stabbed at Thomas’s stomach, but only for the second it took his mind to take control, issue calm. “To search what?”

“Your home. Cars. Offices. Everything.”

“I have nothing to hide.” But it wouldn’t look good to his constituents. And once doubt was cast…

Damn Kassar. Thomas had wiped the floor with his Democrat opposition—who’d been fully endorsed by Kassar—during last year’s election. The man would stoop to anything to get his own back. He’d seen Thomas’s remarks to the press as a personal attack. It wasn’t personal at all. Publishing a man’s accomplishments or lack thereof, as the case might be, was just part of politics.

Douglas, resting against Thomas’s desk, glanced down at the papers he held, nodding. Thomas recognized the blue folder. It contained the complete record of Thomas’s experiences with San Francisco’s law enforcement—one traffic ticket when he was sixteen, and everything relating to Kate’s disappearance.

The familiar jolt that shot through him as he stared at that folder, remembering his beautiful and spirited wife, hurt worse than usual today.

“I don’t like it,” Douglas said. “You have an airtight alibi. They shouldn’t still be poking around. I plan to appeal.”

Douglas was the best on his team, but only because Thomas, once the city’s highest-paid defense attorney, wasn’t practicing anymore.

Thomas shook his head. “Appeal on a warrant decision is so rare, it would play right into Kassar’s hands, drawing even more attention to me. Besides, if we do that, some people are going to think I have something to hide.”

“You know as well as I do that your being clean won’t stop them from finding potential evidence if they try hard enough.”

“They won’t try. They don’t have a case and they know it. They don’t want to come out of this with egg on their faces, either. Kassar aside, as far as the D.A. is concerned, this is merely a formality. So he can tell the mayor, and the mayor can tell his voters, that it’s been done. San Francisco’s second wealthy young beauty has just disappeared. They have to turn over every stone on this one.”

These were all facts he was comfortable with. Still, out of curiosity…

“What were the reasonable grounds?”

“You’re associated with both women.”

“What wealthy young woman in San Francisco don’t I know?” Thomas asked. In the past ten years, he’d done enough campaigning, socializing, smiling and schmoozing to get elected president of the United States if he decided to make a run for that office. “What wealthy person don’t I know?”

“You were the husband of one and escort of the other.”

Thank God that well-known fact was all they had to go on. He was innocent in both cases, but the prosecution might come to a different conclusion—the wrong conclusion—if they had all the facts.

“They’re going to see if they can find something among my things—phone calls I’ve made, bills I’ve paid, food in my refrigerator, whatever—that might connect the two disappearances.”

He hadn’t practiced courtroom law so successfully for seventeen years without learning how to outthink the prosecution.

“Leah and Kate were best friends.”

“So maybe they ran off together!”

Douglas chuckled without any real humor. “You don’t really believe that.”

Thomas rubbed his hand across his face, an unusual display of weakness. Revealing emotion, especially negative emotion, was something he almost never did. A Whitehead kept up appearances at all costs. In his world, that rule had been the most important condition for sustaining life. Breathing came in a close second.

“No,” he said, looking up at his attorney and closest friend. “I don’t believe that.” His voice broke and he stopped a moment to calm himself. “Kate and I…we—”

“I understand, buddy.” Douglas’s hand on his shoulder kept him from making even more of an idiot of himself.

“Sorry,” he said, standing. The ability to detach himself had always served him well—in the courtroom and in life. He wouldn’t lose it again.

“Hey, Thomas, this is me. No need to apologize.” Douglas rounded the desk, shoving the folder back in his hand-tooled leather briefcase. “Frankly, man,” he continued, his voice a little muffled as he bent over the chair in front of Thomas’s desk, latching his case, “I don’t know how you do it. If it were me and I’d lost Kate—let alone the baby—they’d have had to pull me out of the river. And now Leah. It’s…unsettling, you know?”

“I know.” Arms crossed over his chest, Thomas stood beside his desk, nodding slowly.

Douglas straightened, stared at him for a long silent minute. “Yeah, I guess you do. Listen, you want to hit the club tonight? I could use a drink.”

“Maybe.” He’d be drinking, that was for sure. “As long as Mother’s okay.”

“What’s it been, six months now since your father died?”

Thomas nodded.

“How’s she doing?”

“Like the rest of us, I guess. She has good days and bad ones. Nights are the hardest.”

Shaking his head, Douglas moved to the door. “You guys have had it rough lately, but you know what that means.”

“What?”

“That your turn’s coming for something really big.”

Thomas was counting on that.

Scott’s four days off made it difficult for Tricia to get to the paper every morning, but that didn’t stop her from driving herself crazy until she had the most recent edition of the San Francisco Gazette in her hands. She hated lying to Scott, hated being impatient with him when he accompanied her and Taylor on their morning walks, and then suggested going to the Grape Street dog park so the little boy could run and play with the animals. For some reason, her son was smitten with dogs. She’d never had a pet in her life and she’d certainly never considered having one that not only lived in the house but shed, drooled and didn’t wipe after it went to the bathroom. But watching Scott and Taylor with the unleashed pets in the park, she couldn’t help laughing.