Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(74)

“So she arranged for them all to be kidnapped?” Tessa wasn’t following.

“I’m not saying the affair led directly to the kidnapping. I’m wondering if the fallout from the affair didn’t put things in play for Friday night.”

“Such as?” They’d arrived at her car.

“Well, we got Lopez, Justin’s second in command, looking at his boss with fresh, angry eyes. Combine that with maybe disgruntlement over the direction things are going at the company level and…”

“Then there’s Anita Bennett,” Tessa picked up. “She was once the other woman, even, possibly had a son. Got her nowhere. Now Justin is engaging in similar behavior, perhaps aggravating old wounds, new prejudices.”

“Then we got Libby, doping herself up with Vicodin to cover her pain. And maybe engaging in other new behaviors as well.” Wyatt slid into the passenger seat, holding up the evidence log. “While you and Lopez wrapped up your tango, I finished reviewing the inventory list for the trash recovered from the Denbes’ brownstone. Garage bin. Item thirty-six down. Best guess, based on trash pickup, is that the contents are no more than two days old.”

Wyatt pointed. Tessa peeked.

“A pregnancy test? A positive home pregnancy test?”

“Yep. Question is, does Justin Denbe know he’s a father again? Or…is he?”





Chapter 26


IS MY HUSBAND A CHAUVINISTIC PIG? I suppose, if you look at our marriage, he appears sexist. And yet, he is the father of an amazing fifteen-year-old girl. Who he personally taught to cluster six shots to center mass time and time again. Let alone, from the day of her birth, he’s actively spoken of Ashlyn’s future as head of the family firm. No need to try for a son. For Justin, from the moment he held his daughter in his arms, she was absolutely, positively perfect.

I always preferred to think of us as coworkers whose areas of expertise happened to fall along traditional lines. My husband works. He loves his job; he’s at his best when wrestling with a multimillion-dollar-contract issue. And I love my job, which includes creating our house, raising our child and crafting a lifestyle that reflects who we are as a family.

I’ve never thought of my role as lesser. I’ve never thought of Justin as the “one in command.” At least, not until six months ago. But even then, I didn’t view myself as the weak half of the marriage. I simply viewed myself as a failure. Because if part of my job was to meet the needs of the family, how well could I be doing, considering my husband had taken up with another woman?

Of course, I understand deep down inside that from the beginning, one of the things Justin had most loved about me was my independence. And eighteen years later, there wasn’t much of that left.

There is a breed of men out there, you know, who are attracted to strong women. They just don’t know what to do once they win us over.

So that’s how I view my husband, the strong man, driven to pursue a strong woman, then mostly at a loss forever after. If that’s patronizing, well then, maybe that makes me the chauvinistic one. Because given the family history, I can’t say I was totally surprised that my husband cheated on me. I was mostly ashamed for not figuring it out sooner. And hurt, because I had wanted us to be different. I had imagined myself to be special enough, attractive enough, smart enough, to forever hold Justin’s interest.

Love is risk.

I took it, and I got burned.

But someday, my daughter will take the same risk. And I don’t have the heart to tell her to take the easy road. Because there is a breed of women out there who are attracted to alpha males. We just don’t always know what to do with them once we have them.


JUSTIN WAS CONVINCED he knew how to handle Z. Let him do the talking, and we’d be ransomed out of our prison cell by the end of the day. Which meant the first thing Ashlyn and I had to do was talk him down. We’d tried fighting fire with fire. We’d made a stand, we’d even attempted rebellion. To date, it had gotten us Tased and battered.

If Z and his crew were former military, then warfare was their specialty.

We needed a different approach. One outside the alpha dog’s normal realm of experience. I had a few ideas on the subject, which Ashlyn seconded. Given Justin’s current condition, we slowly but surely wore him down. One of us, he might have dismissed. Two of us, he eventually gave way. My idea, our plan. We would execute as a team, our first family project in six months. And we would win. I was convinced of it. There was finally enough at stake.

The hardest part was waiting.

We sat, Ashlyn on the top bunk, Justin and I below. First rule of psychological warfare: He or she who initiates the discussion has by definition given up ground. We couldn’t afford to give up ground.

So we practiced patience.

My tremors were returning. My headache, the deep, dragging exhaustion, punctuated by moments of excruciatingly painful cramping. The pills, whatever Radar had given me in the middle of the night, seemed to be waning, placing me once more on the withdrawal express.

I could confess to Justin. Tell him once and for all what I’d spent the past few months doing. Just how great a spouse and parent I’d turned out to be.

But again, she who initiates the discussion has by definition given up ground.

So I held my tongue.

We had no sense of time anymore. Daylight outside. Constant fluorescent lighting inside. Morning, mid-morning?