Chapter 1
Zane
It had been a long night, and for the first time in years, I slept in on Saturday morning. I’d had to stay later than I wanted at the club, helping with the clean-up since we were still short a guy. Whether or not he was actually interested in the job, I refused to allow Alfonso back into my club, and I still hadn’t interviewed new candidates.
But the exhausting parts had nothing to do with coming home so late. Kathryn’s appearance – and our tryst in the closet – had taken a lot out of me, even though just being with her had relieved some of my tension. Of course, it came right back with the reminder that I had to keep her safe, from the goons my wife had hired, and probably from Samantha herself.
After Samantha had picked me up, she growled and accused and bashed me the entire drive home. As she pulled into the garage finally, she reminded me of my ‘house arrest’ and told me either she’d take me to the club tomorrow night if I needed to be there, or she’d have the Men in Black give me a ride.
As I slowly came awake, I opened one eye and peered at the bedside clock. It was almost ten, and I felt groggy but excited. Samantha was long gone by now. It was blessed relief.
But as I got up to shower and shave, anger filled me. Sam was ruining my life, quite literally. I had to sneak around with the woman I really wanted, disrespecting her with lies and sex in a closet.
I closed my eyes as I washed my hair and thought of Kathryn, the look on her face when she was in the throes of passion, but that only pissed me off even more. I wanted that. I wanted to sleep in the same bed, wake up next to her, and make her scream in passion every day and every night. I needed to get out of Sam’s clutches. I could feel her nails digging deeper every day as she made more demands, more rules. If I didn’t cut it off soon, she was going to rip out my heart and soul.
Not because she wanted my heart and soul. Only because she needed to take them from me so she could control me.
I headed to the gym, the only place I could really think, to release some of the aggression that had built up. I couldn’t waste away under Sam’s boot heel. I wanted to throw my free weights at the mirrors and shatter them. I was disgusted with myself for how I’d let her rule over me and force me into a box, a life I didn’t want. And I was furious with her for making me feel weak, for thinking I was enough of a pushover to just sit back and accept this for the rest of my life.
Most of all, I was furious with myself, for sitting here and taking it. I’d stayed here for so long not just for the club, but for my mom. It was still my choice, though.
My original deal with Sam had been for however long it took to please her parents. I’d hoped she would eventually get to that point, but I’d been delusional, it seemed.
I hated this stagnant life, and I made a decision. I was finally done. I wasn’t going to live like this any longer. I’d found someone who made me happy, and I had a career that was successful and exciting. With that career, I could still help my mother out. It would be harder without Sam’s money, but I couldn’t live like this anymore. It was time to take control and change the direction my life was headed.
There was only one way to do that.
I vowed to myself in that moment that I was going to tell her parents everything. I would call Dear Old Dad, under the pretense that I wanted to talk to him about this job in the oil industry, and that would get him to pencil me into his busy schedule. And instead, I would tell him the truth about his daughter.
I would tell him that Samantha, who always acted like a little angel, was a liar and that we weren’t in love. We slept in separate bedrooms. I would explain that, if Sam came up pregnant, the kid wouldn’t be mine because we hadn’t had sex in years.
I would end by letting him know just how devious she really was, explaining to him what had really happened to a lot of the money in the trust fund. I would tell him how she didn’t know how to stop spending, and she was a felon who should go to prison for the things she’d done.
After I explained all of this to him, I would explain it again to Sam’s mother, if I had to. And when they both knew how horribly Sam had screwed up, how terribly she’d treated me, I would file the divorce papers. I had to be free of her. I had to get out.
Unfortunately, before I could make the phone call that would buy me my freedom, I needed the proof. I needed hard evidence of her cheating and lying and breaking the law. Otherwise, it was my word against hers. Even if Sam’s father disapproved of her, he wouldn’t side with me if I couldn’t provide solid evidence to back up my word. He’d still stand by his daughter, even if he was more inclined to believe me.
Blood ran thick.
Honestly, I had plenty of time alone in the house, and I had been squandering it with laziness and playing around. I should have been searching for something to incriminate her this whole time. But it wasn’t too late. I finished my workout, took the obligatory shower, and dressed again.
For the first time in weeks, I climbed the staircase. I didn’t even stop to look in the master bedroom.
I went straight to Sam’s home office.
Technically, she didn’t really need one. She lived off the trust fund. But with her illegal activities, she needed a place where no one could hear the things she said or did. But she didn’t keep it locked. She figured I needed her and wouldn’t go in there.
So, I pushed the door open and made a face. The office was a complete disaster, with papers strewn everywhere, several coffee cups in various stages of full littered the desk. File drawers didn’t close because the folders in them were stuffed haphazardly and stuck out the top.
Even worse, the air in here was stale, and I had to wonder when Sam had last been inside. I assumed she came in to at least check her email, but maybe I was wrong. I certainly wouldn’t be able to work in this sort of environment.
Sadly, that was exactly what I was going to have to do, though, if I wanted to find the proof I needed. It would be here, somewhere, on a piece of paper or on the hard drive of that computer.
Resigned to the odor and the growths in the coffee cups, I decided to start with the papers strewn across the desk. These seemed to be the most recent additions to the room, since they weren’t filed.
I rounded her desk, tripping over a pair of high heels she’d left next to it, and sat in her leather desk chair with the ergonomic recline feature, a chair that probably cost more than some people’s cars. I had a hard time deciding how to do this. Obviously, there was no method to the madness, and if I stacked up the pages and receipts I went through, I could probably scatter them randomly back over the desk without Sam ever noticing a difference.
I started working from left to right, piling everything neatly in a small space I cleared. I sneered and felt sick to my stomach looking at receipts proving how much money was literally pouring out of Sam’s hands. Two grand on a pair of diamond earrings here, a thousand on her hair there. I was pretty vain and went to a nice salon to make sure it was perfect, but my bill never exceeded $150. I couldn’t understand paying that much for a hair style, even for a woman, especially since there were three receipts for the same salon at the same price over the past two months.
And her hair didn’t look any different.
Another bill from Nordstrom’s for six grand, plus a receipt from some specialty shop for another twelve, had me swallowing bile. But then I found something for a custom tailored, double breasted men’s suit. I hadn’t been the recipient of the suit, so she’d been spending money on some other guy. Probably Alfonso.
There were more bills and receipts for menswear and gifts. A Rolex, cologne, a bill for Armani Exchange, and a men’s spa and salon added up to nearly twenty thousand dollars, and my fury reached a boiling point. I was confined to the house, and here she was, draining away her trust fund on some idiot. I thought of making copies of the receipts to show her father, but there was nothing in them that proved those gifts weren’t for me. No measurements, no details that I could easily point toward someone else.
I shuffled the papers and receipts around, spreading them back out in a mess on the desk. I picked up a few random papers on the floor, but I didn’t see anything there, either. Those were mostly bank statements and other mail, and I noted how quickly the funds were dwindling. Tossing them back down and not caring where they landed, I sighed in frustration.
I stared at her computer and decided it was time to try to hack into it. I knew that, if there were no paper documents, there definitely had to be something of consequence on her email or saved in a file on the hard drive. Correspondence with her boyfriend was a certainty. If nothing else, I’d be able to prove she was a cheater. But I had a gut feeling I’d find something on her illegal activities, maybe even uncover who she was working with.
I sat back down and booted up the machine, waiting forever for the login screen to pop up. I didn’t know what she’d been doing to the thing, but a machine as powerful and recently updated as her computer was shouldn’t run so slow. She’d probably downloaded porn or something else that gave her a virus and was corrupting her hard drive.
Served her right.
When the screen finally asked for a password, I cursed. I had hoped she would be dumb enough or confident enough not to password protect it. Now, I would have to figure out what she was using for a password.
I started with the four most commonly used words – love, sex, money, and god. I tried different iterations of capitals and lower case letters, but I couldn’t get in. I tried every important date I could think of, using special characters in place of numbers, abbreviations for months instead of numbers, and even Roman numerals, but I couldn’t get it. I was surprised that I hadn’t been locked out of the screen yet, and I realized that, if I kept trying, I’d screw up and leave the evidence that I’d been in here. Sam would know she hadn’t put in wrong passwords.
I sat back in the chair, folding my hands behind my head and staring at the ceiling in frustration as the chair leaned back so far I thought it might tip backward. But it held my weight as I thought about what else I could try. There had to be something I could get my hands on to send to Sam’s father to prove I wasn’t the bad guy here.
But I was running out of time, ideas, and patience.