Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense)(64)

My father looks back at me, triumphant, as he wipes a thin streak of blood from his chin with the back of his wrist. A fist drives into my gut.

“Get off him!” Ellie screams.

She runs at me. Dad tackles her around the waist, lifts her up bodily from the floor, and dumps her on the bed. Ellie throws herself at him like a wildcat, and he barely stops her raking his face with her nails by grabbing her wrist. The sight of him pinning her down by the arms renews my fury.

I kick my legs and I’m almost loose. It would take more than two guys to keep me from her. I’ll fight a whole f*cking army, I— Oh, they have a Taser.

Tasers hurt.

It’s like a sledgehammer in the middle of my back. Somehow I still struggle as the voltage races in hot knives down my arms, and rips control of my body away from me as all my muscles clench at once. I can’t f*cking breathe.

Ellie! I want to scream, but there’s no air in my lungs. I slump for a second when the pain stops and start to move, and then they hit me again. Thick black cloth pulls down over my face and takes the world with it.





When I wake up, I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. Every muscle is a knot of raw agony, like a knife blade lies wedged between my meat and my bones, all over. Even my f*cking face muscles hurt. I can feel a bruise on my back, a dull throb amidst the chaotic agony. It takes me a minute to open my eyes, and one of them won’t go. I got hit in the face somewhere along the line and didn’t even feel it.

I reach up to prod the shiner on my eye but my wrist stops, hot pain digging into my flesh. A glance down and I see I’m cuffed to the bed.

The bed being a flattened reclining seat in a private jet. Talk about a gilded cage. Jeez. As my senses return one by one, filtering through the dull ache that throbs throbs my entire body, I start to hear the drone of the engines and smell the crisp scent of freshly shampooed carpeting. My father, being none the worse for wear, sits across the aisle with his feet up on an ottoman, sipping whisky from a heavy crystal tumbler while he reads the Wall Street Journal.

“The cuffs were a good idea.”

“Why’s that?” he says, almost disinterested.

“Because if I push hard enough, that newspaper will fit up your ass.”

He snorts. “You think you’re so f*cking clever, don’t you?”

Still, he has not looked up from his newspaper.

“This will be easy to take care of. I’m already in touch with that moronic Elvis chapel. I made clear the value of their silence in this matter. Thankfully they’re the only witnesses. Fortunately for us, Nevada makes it easy to undo the drunken mistakes people make in their many chapels. The paperwork for an annulment is already in process.”

“No.”

With an exasperated sigh, he folds his paper and looks over at me. “No, what?”

“I’m not divorcing or annulling it or whatever it is. You can’t make me.”

“You can’t make me,” he parrots in a singsong voice.

“Oh, f*ck you, you obnoxious jackass.”

“I’m not going to let you f*ck up your life.”

“You’re already doing a fantastic job.”

He glares at me. “Really? Is that the gratitude I get? Maybe you’d rather be working at a McDonalds in Arizona to help your mother pay her mortgage.”

“I’d rather spend the rest of my life with the woman I love than be alone and frustrated because all my riches can’t buy me happiness.”

“Do I look alone and frustrated? I just got married.”

“To the future Ex Mrs. Marshall. Number three. Or four? I’ve lost count. All of whom but one married you for your money, and we both know it.”

“You talk a big game, but you wouldn’t be anything without my money and influence. Your Army postings, schooling, it’s all because of me. I made you.”

“Yeah, and that’s the problem, Dad. I’d rather be what I made myself, whatever it is, than what you try to make me.”

He sits up and downs his drink. “What is it about this girl?”

“I love her. I feel like trying to explain this to you is like trying to explain purple to a dog. What do you want me to do, write a poem?”

“Why? Have you seen her? Her face looks like somebody took an angle grinder to it.”

I let out an exasperated sigh, and regret it right away. My muscles feel like I’ve been worked on with hammers all day. Or night. I don’t know how long I’ve been out.

“She’s more to me than her face, and her face is more to me than her scars. When she smiles I see all the times she’s ever smiled for me. When I look in her eyes I see somebody that’s looking at the man I want to be. Besides, it’s not the scars. She wasn’t scarred before. I don’t know what it is about her that you disliked, but it had to be something, or you wouldn’t have tried to kill her.”

He looks genuinely surprised, his big bushy eyebrows climbing up his face. “What?”

“The accident. It was you, had to be.”

My father jerks upright and stands up, almost hits his head on the curved wall of the plane, and sits back down.

“Are you f*cking crazy? Do you think I’d risk killing my own son?”

“What, did the steering and brakes just stop working out of the blue?”