Deadly Fortune: A Contemporary Suspense Romance (Romantic Mystery And Suspense Short Stories Book 1)

Deadly Fortune

Jade Allen

Copyright © 2015 by Jade Allen

www.redlilypublishing.com

All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, with the exception of brief quoted passages left in an online review. This book is a fictional story. All characters, names, and situations are of the author’s creation. Any resemblances to actual situations or to persons who are alive or dead are purely coincidental.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; this copy is not available for resale or to give to another reader aside from any transaction through Amazon’s e-book lending program.

Disclaimer

This book is intended for readers age 18 an over. It contains mature situations and sexual content that may be objectionable to some readers.

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Rachel groaned into her pillow as the sound of Muse’s “Hysteria” ripped her out of the depths of an intense sleep. She reached out blindly, groping for her phone on the bedside table, trying to decide whether or not it was worth it to cue the snooze function. It would only net her an extra nine minutes—just enough time to start drifting off again before the alarm came back on—but the weight behind her eyes, the heaviness of her arms and legs against the soft, warm bed, was so tempting to give into.

She pulled her face free of the pillow and opened her eyes, staring dumbly at the still-playing alarm flashing on the screen. She knew if she didn’t make up her mind soon, she would be fully awake, and there would be no point in tapping the snooze icon. Groaning again, she tapped the icon and dropped the phone onto the bed next to her, curling up. She could at least pretend, for the moment, that she didn’t have anywhere to be.

Rachel was still hovering in the mental space between asleep and awake when the alarm went off again; her brain had started to perk up into function, insistently cataloging everything she would have to get done that day, in spite of the deep-seated desire to return to sleep.
God, I don’t want to go to work,
she thought, sitting up in bed and reaching for her phone to shut off the alarm for good. She could have, theoretically, hit the snooze button one more time; she only needed twenty minutes to get ready for work, and the alarm was set to forty-five minutes before she had to leave. But she was awake; there was no point in pretending anymore.

She took a deep breath and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, climbing down and scrubbing at her slightly greasy-feeling face. Rachel decided that a big glass of water, a toothbrush, and some face soap would complete the process of transitioning out of sleep and into waking life. But first, she absolutely had to get the coffee started.

Rachel wandered out of her bedroom and into the kitchen, blinking sleepily as her feet shuffled along the rug; for the moment, she was determined not to check her email, or even to look and see what was going on amongst her friends online. The quiet of the house, so early in her day, was not to be interrupted by considerations of the incredible mess waiting for her when she arrived at work. Her body moved automatically as she went into the small apartment kitchen: turning on the faucet, rinsing the coffee pot, scooping coffee into the basket, reaching up to retrieve a glass from the cupboard. Slowly but surely, her body was coming awake, her brain losing the lingering fog of sleep.

While the coffee brewed, Rachel downed the glass of water in a few rapid swallows, washed her face, and brushed her teeth, sitting down heavily at the tiny table in her dining room—a second-hand rescue from when a distant aunt had passed away while she was in college, and her cousins had needed to get rid of as much of the woman’s hoarded furniture as they could. She poured herself a cup of coffee and added milk and sugar, giving it an experimental, necessary sip before she finally unlocked her phone and tapped on the email icon.

A resigned sigh gusted through her lips as the screen loaded, showing somewhere between fourteen and twenty new emails. Rachel took a deep breath and began to skim the previews, her eyes taking in subject lines and the first sentence or so of the messages themselves. She mentally prioritized them based on who they were from, whether or not the subject line said “urgent” and her own experience. It had been a little over two years since she had gratefully taken the job of Administrative Assistant, feeling the hot breath of student loan debt collectors on her neck. She had worked hard to get as many scholarships as possible to make her way through college, but Rachel had been forced to resort to loans when there was simply not enough money

About a year into working for Elite Advertising, Rachel had come to the conclusion that the job was never going to get any better. She knew that her superiors had low-balled her on their initial offer, counting on her desperation to get a job—any job. She knew that they had no intention of appreciably increasing her pay, or giving her any kind of promotion; she had proven herself to be too efficient to make the argument that additional responsibilities merited an increase in pay. Whenever she tentatively raised the subject, she was met with “But you’re so capable; this will only take up a few minutes here and there in your schedule.” The thought of abandoning the job, of finding something better, had occurred to her more than once—but the very real possibility that she would leave one dead-end only to step into another held her back.

Rachel shelved the topic of the day’s work in favor of checking in on her friends for a few minutes. She glanced at the time—she still had ten minutes before she needed to start getting ready in earnest. Scrolling through her feed, Rachel frowned enviously at pictures of one friend’s exotic vacation—something she could never scratch up enough extra cash to afford—and a coworker’s new car.
They can afford to bump pay for the sales team, but not for the girl practically running the place,
she thought bitterly, closing out the app before her resentment could bloom out of proportion.

She decided to rub a little more salt in the wound, and opened up her banking app, thinking that she would make a couple of plans—maybe pay a couple of bills—before she got dressed and made up for the day’s work. Logging in, Rachel went through her usual mental routine of trying to estimate just how much she
should
have in the bank, recalling the groceries she had bought a few days earlier, the lunch she had treated herself to after forgetting the Tupperware holding her leftovers. When the screen finished loading, she glanced at the total and her mouth fell open in shock.

“Two million dollars? What the hell? What—how—it’s got to be a mistake,” she said, shaking her head and blinking her eyes to clear them. But the total still showed the same amount. Rachel tapped the account details option and saw, to her amazement, that it had come from a transfer, showing as posted just that morning.

Her mind spun for a moment. It still had to be a mistake; someone had tried to send a transfer to their kid, or to a family member—maybe even a corrupt politician—and had gotten some of the digits wrong on the account number. Rachel looked at the time, wondering just how long the hold period would be for the customer service line. She chewed on her bottom lip and considered. On one hand, she absolutely had to get ready for work—she would be late if she didn’t. On the other hand, Rachel thought it was entirely possible that, assuming the transfer into her account was a mistake, she would probably face a much bigger problem later on down the line if it wasn’t corrected quickly.

She called her boss, leaving a voicemail saying that she had to take care of a personal issue and would be a few minutes late getting in. Rachel then pulled out her debit card and dialed the number on the back of it, fidgeting in her pajamas as she entered her account information and passcode. She tapped her foot lightly on the floor as the hold music played, her heart beating faster.
What if it isn’t a mistake?
She thought, her brain barely—barely—daring to hope. But how she could have ended up with two million dollars in her bank account without it being a mistake of some kind was impossible to comprehend. No one she knew had that kind of money. The wealthiest of her friends and family were only making—at most—a hundred thousand or so per year.

Her mouth was dry and she sipped at her coffee, forcing herself to breathe slowly. The customer service agent finally came on the line, and Rachel explained her dilemma. “That is…certainly an odd situation,” the woman on the other end of the phone said, sounding nearly as surprised as Rachel was. “I’ll be happy to look into that for you in a little more detail. Would you be okay with holding?” Rachel told the woman that she would, even though her skin was crawling, even though she felt an instinctive fear that just by alerting the bank to the discrepancy, she might—at any moment—find her door kicked in by unknown “others.”

When the woman came back on the line, Rachel eagerly told her that yes, she was still there. “I’ve looked everywhere possible,” the woman said, with a mixture of confusion and certainty in her voice. “There is no way that the transfer is even possibly a mistake. I was even able to call up the original bank form that was used—and your name was specified, along with your account number. We use a redundancy system to guard against errors; it doesn’t always work, but it’s clear that someone apparently wanted to give you two million dollars.” The woman paused. “I guess… congratulations?” The phone almost slipped out of her fingers, and Rachel barely managed a coherent reply before ending the call.

As she sat in numb silence at the table, a dawning realization came over her.
I don’t have to go to work today.
She smiled slowly.
If I’m careful, I don’t have to go to work ever.
She began to laugh, eyes wide, shaking her head in shock at the turn of events.

Two days later, Rachel had formally quit her job, not even giving notice, and submitting a resignation letter that, if formal and moderately polite, at least provided some food for thought to any of the people in HR who might have actually concerned themselves with a disaffected employee. She had not given specific reasons for why she was leaving so abruptly; to Rachel’s mind, the fewer people who knew about her unexpected windfall, the better. But the question of just who had sent her the money, why they had sent it to her, continued to plague her in the back of her mind, even as she went about putting plans into place to not only protect it, but to make it last as long as humanly possible.

She had gone into the bank the same day and spoke to a manager who had been unable to discover the source of the transfer—it had been done anonymously. The trail was worse than cold; the manager told her that deliberate steps had been taken to obscure the identity of whoever had sent the transfer into her bank account. “Whoever gave you this money sure doesn’t want anyone to know it was them,” he had said, shaking his head at the vagaries of the wealthy.

Rachel decided to forego the pursuit of her mysterious benefactor for the time being. When the bank manager had suggested that she work with the bank’s wealth management division, she was more than happy to go along with his idea, knowing that while she had ample experience making twenty dollars last for a week, she had very little notion of how to live with millions. She knew that decisions would have to be made—whether to invest, what to invest in, how much money she really needed to live every year, all the myriad of choices that came along with a sudden windfall. Taxes, charities, debts to be paid off; did she want to buy a house, since she had the money to pay for it outright? Did she want to get a new car to replace the old jalopy she had scrimped to purchase when her first car had finally, irrevocably died?

Her phone rang as Rachel was getting out of her old, worn out car, preparing to walk into the bank to talk to someone about a safe, long-term investment strategy. She dug her phone out of her purse, glancing at the number flashing across the screen. It wasn’t a complete number; it was only four digits long. She shook her head and moved out of the flow of traffic, deciding that she would just answer it. If it was a telemarketer or scammer, at least she would know for sure. “Hello?”

There was a crackle of interference on the line, a high-pitched tone that nearly made Rachel pull the phone away from her ear, and then a distorted voice. “That money doesn’t belong to you. We’re going to get it back.” She turned her head, staring at the phone for a moment in mute shock.

“What money? Who are you?” Her mind flip-flopped between confusion, anger and fear. In an instant, she realized that whoever had called her, they were almost certainly referring to the anonymous transfer into her account.

“You got money that you didn’t deserve,” said the distorted voice on the other end of the line. “We’re going to get it back. We know where you are at all times.” The call cut out, and for a moment, Rachel wondered if it was intentional or accidental. Her hand shook and she waited for a moment to see if the number would flash on her screen again. There was nothing. Rattled, looking around her—remembering what the person on the other end of the line had said about knowing where she was at all times—Rachel slipped her phone back into her purse and swallowed against the tight, dry feeling in her throat, gathering up what little composure she had at her command before she walked towards the entrance of the bank.

She sat through the meeting, even though her mind was spinning from the phone call she had received. Logic dictated that Rachel should call the police, but what exactly could she tell them?
“Some strange person with a distorted voice and an invalid number called me and said that they were going to get their money back from me.”
Not only would there be nothing for them to really go on, but Rachel suspected that they wouldn’t even take it seriously. She signed the papers after barely reading them, realizing that she should have taken the time to read the fine print.

As she left the bank, she was so consumed with confusion and fear that she didn’t notice a man standing off to the side, watching the entrance. Rachel moved towards her car, looking at the ground, trying to make sense of what had happened—not only the sudden wealth, but the even more recent fact that apparently someone didn’t want her to have it—and didn’t see the man slowly starting to walk in her direction. She heard the sound of idle whistling, but didn’t pay any attention to it as she neared her car, trying to decide where she should go next—whether it should be home, or somewhere public.
“We know where you are at all times,”
the voice had said. Presumably, as long as she was in public, she was at least relatively safe; she didn’t think that anyone would be stupid enough to grab her where there might be witnesses.

She turned the key in her lock and suddenly felt a hand on her shoulder. Rachel wheeled around, bringing her hands up, holding her keys tightly in her right hand to provide herself, instinctively, with something that had a little more heft than her fist itself. Her heart was pounding in her chest as her gaze fell on the man standing behind her: tall and muscular, towering over her, his eyes were covered by a thick pair of dark sunglasses, his face half-hidden behind dark brown hair that fell nearly to his shoulders. He was dressed in jeans, a tee shirt, and a hooded sweater, all carefully nondescript, in washed-out colors.

Rachel backed up until she collided with the door of her car, trying to decide whether it would be better to try and get in—potentially putting the car between herself and the stranger—or to cry out for help, struggle, call attention to herself. Before she could decide, the man smiled slowly. “You’re a woman with a big load of trouble on your hands, and you let me nearly get the drop on you—not the best strategy.” The man’s voice was light and low, almost gravelly to her ears, rippling with an Irish accent that made him sound even more amused than Rachel thought he actually was.

“I—who are you? What do you know about my troubles?” she looked around quickly, to see if there was anyone loitering in the parking lot at the bank who might come to her aid; it was almost suspiciously empty, just one or two people walking with self-absorbed determination towards the entrance or back to their cars.

“Name’s Dylan,” the man said. “As for what I know about your troubles: I know you probably got a phone call not too long ago that you have no idea how to trace, regarding a very large sum of money you recently came into.” Rachel stared at him in shock;
how could he possibly know what’s going on
?

“You—were you the one—” she shook her head, looking around in panic again, reflexively grabbing at her car door.

“No, love. I’m not the one who’s after you. But I know who is—and you’re going to need me around. I got dropped off here to wait for you to come out, so I don’t have a car to my name, and you don’t really need to be driving anywhere alone just now. So how’s about you unlock the car, let me in, and crawl over to the passenger side; then you can tell me where we’re going.” For a long moment, Rachel considered refusing. She looked around again, but there was no one around. They were alone in the parking lot. She had her phone—but if this Dylan person had bad intentions for her, she doubted he would let her get a call out to anyone.
If he had bad intentions, he wouldn’t have even let me stand here this long, he’d probably have just grabbed me… he did say he was dropped off… how stupid do you have to be to take someone’s words at face value when you’ve already been threatened by someone else?
She took a deep breath.

“Can I make a phone call first?” she asked. Dylan raised one dark eyebrow from behind the sunglasses he wore.

“Don’t see as it would change anything. I’d recommend against calling the police—the folks who are after you are in pretty deep with them, and at best you won’t be taken seriously.” Rachel swallowed. Should she trust him at all? “I swear to you, Rachel, I’m here to help; I’m not going to get you into the car and cart you off to someone else. Get in, tell me where we’re going, and that is precisely where I’ll take you.” Rachel hesitated a moment longer, trying to decide to what extent—if any—she could trust the stranger. She sighed; he had her blocked off. She was within arm’s reach. Rachel took a deep breath and turned her back to Dylan, opening the car door and crawling from the driver’s side to the passenger side.

Dylan swung into the driver’s side and snatched up the keys from Rachel’s nervous hands, inserting one into the ignition and turning it. As the car roared to life, Rachel pulled the seatbelt around, glancing at Dylan as misgivings filled her mind. “So, tell me where we’re going, love.”