Unnatural Relations (Lust and Lies Series, Book 1) (31 page)

She clenched her hands in her lap and took a breath. "I know you've been following us again. Why would you do that if you've gotten over your obsession with me?"

He leaned forward with his elbows on her desk. "I just wanted to see Matthew. You know how I feel about our boy. That's one of the reasons I want to make up with you. I'm still the closest thing he has to a father. I want to be able to spend time with him and have him know how I helped you through that horrible pregnancy."

"How you
helped
me?" Realizing that they were attracting curious attention, she lowered her voice, but anger had brought a flush to her cheeks and an unusual hardness to her voice. "Simon Decker told me all about how much you
helped
me. You're lucky I don't hire an assassin to pay you back for all the help you gave me. And if you don't stay away from me and my son, I may still do that."

He studied her eyes for a moment, then said, "I came to Virginia to apologize for all that, but I can see that you don't have enough goodness in your heart to hear my side of it." He rose and bent forward with his hands braced on her desk and his face an inch from hers. "You're even a bigger bitch now than you were then. And bitches always get what's coming to them sooner or later."

"Do you need assistance, Mrs. Johnson?" the bank guard asked with a hostile glare at Russ.

She was struggling not to give in to the panic gnawing on her stomach and the question gave her something solid to hang on to. "Yes. Would you please escort this man out of the bank, and if he comes here again, I'd appreciate your calling the police. I have a restraining order against him."

Russ's eyebrows raised in surprise, then narrowed in fury as he decided she wasn't bluffing. When the guard grasped his elbow to move him along, he shook off the man's hand. "I'll leave on my own, but not before I say one more thing. You think you don't need me, but you're wrong, and I'll prove it."

The guard unsnapped his holster and placed his hand over the butt of his gun.

Russ saw the move and started backing away. "Your new boyfriend's name isn't Kyle. It's Hamilton. And all he wants from you is the same thing Decker wants—control of Matthew!" Without another word, he whirled around and stormed out of the bank.

Barbara thanked the guard for his help and accepted his offer to escort her to her car after work.

Russ's last statement proved that he would say or do anything to get her attention, but to suggest that Kyle was a Hamilton was ridiculous. Even if she stretched her gullibility far enough to consider that, it wouldn't make sense for the Hamiltons to be offering two million dollars to buy Matthew if another relative could be named as heir for free.

She no longer had a single doubt about Russ changing. He still believed she and Matt belonged to him, and he would undoubtedly believe that until the day he died... unless she found a way to show him otherwise.

Dani's comment about a stalker backing off when his victim married another man came back to her, but when she allowed herself to think about marrying Kyle, she still felt they hadn't known each other long enough for her to hand over her and Matthew's life to him, no matter how wonderful he was.

* * *

Russ's tires squealed as he tore out of the bank parking lot. He wanted to punch something...
somebody.
Another restraining order! He hadn't been served yet, but the bitch wouldn't have said it unless she had really filed for one. The last thing he needed now was to get himself thrown in jail... and out of the game.

He probably shouldn't have blurted that out about Ham without being able to prove his claim. Now Barbara would probably tell her
boyfriend
and he might follow through with his death threat.

And if she blabbed it to Tammy, that one would probably make an attempt on his life as well, or at the very least cause him some serious damage. Not that he really cared what she thought. He was sick of her lording it over him, as if she were the only one smart enough to have a plan. He'd begun to suspect that her plan was meant to keep him away from Barbara instead of setting her up to marry him.

Jealous bitch!
Sometimes she acted like her pussy was gold-plated. It was obviously time to show her once and for all who was the boss. The confrontation with Barbara had put him in exactly the right frame of mind to do it too.

As soon as he got back to his motel room, he would call Tammy and demand she get her sassy ass over there pronto. Thoughts of what he could do to straighten her out stirred a ripple of excitement that swelled his dick.

In the meantime, he had Decker's latest offer to think on—a hundred thou to get Barbara out of the way. Rather than use the word
murder,
he had suggested some sort of
permanent abduction
—a scenario in which Russ would get the mommy all to himself and the Hamiltons would be able to discreetly take possession of the son.

Since he had no intention of letting that happen, but wanted to get hold of some of that cash Decker was waving around, he tried to think of a way to kill two birds with one stone.

While he tried to sort out his options, a news item on the radio broke into his thought process. There had been another drive-by shooting in a suburb of Richmond—the third this month. As the idea that news triggered developed into a plan, he revised the old saying about the two birds. If he just killed
one
bird, named Ham, he'd solve two problems. He'd be rid of his competition and, if it looked like the attempt had been against Barbara, Decker might be convinced to fork over an advance chunk of the payment to Russ on good faith.

He had an untraceable gun, but it had been a decade since he'd fired it. He was certain, however, that with a little target practice, he'd be as good as he was when he and Pop used to go hunting. It wouldn't do to get caught practicing around here, though, considering the restraining order.

Then there was still the matter of proving to Barbara that he was the only one she could trust.

In a flash of brilliance, the solution came to him. He hated losing the couple of days it would take to drive home and back, but in doing so, he could collect all the evidence he needed for Barbara, get in the necessary target practice, and avoid being served until he was ready to carry out his plan.

That settled, he went back to fantasizing about how he was going to deal with Tammy before he left on his trip that night.

* * *

After Russ's departure, Barbara began to fret that he might go by Matt's school and try to get to him. Under the circumstances, she was of no use to anyone, and her supervisor gave her permission to go home for the day.

The moment she and Matt walked in the door, she knew someone had been in their house.

"Stay here, honey," she told Matt, leaving the door ajar. "I want to start doing our entrance check again, the way we used to." Matt made a face, but he obeyed, even though he didn't notice what she saw.

It was so subtle, the average person probably would have overlooked the clues. But she had trained herself to pick up on the little things. Each morning before she left the house, she did a walk-through and made sure there were no crumbs on the table, clothes and towels were picked up and so on. Everything had its proper place, and she enjoyed coming home to a neat house after working all day.

One thing out of place she might have attributed to absentmindedness on her part, but there were quite a few. In the living room, the door to the cabinet where she kept her music and videotapes was closed. Since it tended to stick, she never shut it completely. A chair in the kitchen was at a slight angle instead of squared off with the table the way she liked it. At first glance, Matt's room and the bathroom seemed to have been left alone, but her bedroom and closet showed small signs of tampering.

"Okay, Matt," she called after she was certain the intruder wasn't still in the house. "All clear. I'll be out to make us some lunch in a sec." There was no reason to frighten him any more than he already was at this point.

It only took her a few minutes to determine that nothing was missing. She had very little of value anywhere in the house, but if it had been a burglar, surely he would have taken the stereo or Matt's video game system.

If it had been Russ, he would have taken something personal of hers, but all her underwear and toiletries were accounted for. Nothing had been added, either, as Russ often did to let her know he'd been there. Then again, nothing he'd done lately had followed his old patterns.

It didn't look as though frightening her was the motive. Instead, it appeared that someone had been searching for something and had tried to put everything back in its place so that she wouldn't notice that he'd been there. What could she possibly have that someone would want to steal? Who wanted something that he thought she had?

The only answer that came to her was that Simon Decker and the Hamiltons wanted her son. To get him they needed proof that Matthew was Howard's child. She couldn't picture Decker sneaking around her house, but after everything he'd revealed to her, she could easily imagine his hiring someone else to do it for him. He already knew what it said on the birth certificate, but perhaps he thought she had some other document or personal letters he could use.

She moved her vanity chair into the closet, stood on it, and rearranged several shoe boxes on the top shelf until she could retrieve the one that didn't have shoes or a purse in it. Taking it to her bed, she quickly flipped through the contents. It was impossible to tell if anyone had gone through the various receipts and legal documents, and it wouldn't make any difference if they had. There was nothing in there that revealed who Matt's father was.

Her gaze touched on the white envelope in the bottom of the box. Inside were the only items she had left to prove that she had ever known Howard Hamilton IV. She couldn't remember the last time she'd looked at them, and she didn't think she wanted to now, but her fingers pulled the papers out and the past was suddenly staring her in the face.

Regardless of the painful memories they called up, she had never been able to throw away the cartoons Howard had drawn for her. She had told herself it was something positive that she could show Matthew when she finally told him the whole story, but there was more to it than that. She had needed to keep them to remind herself that Howard had loved her enough to ask her to be his wife and that she had loved him enough to have his child even after he abandoned her.

Decker's revelations had slashed open the old wound and poured salt into it. She and Howard had had a chance for the kind of happiness very few people ever experienced and his parents had coldheartedly stolen it from them.

All these years she had thought Howard had given in to them because he was a spineless boy, but that hadn't been the case. In his attempt to impress her with his power, Decker had admitted that Howard had resisted the attempts to break them up. His only weakness had been in not knowing how ruthless his parents could be.

Barbara recalled Decker saying that the Hamiltons never got over the loss of their son. She hoped to God they thought about it every single day... the same way she had for years—like a knife twisting in their chests.

They should burn in hell for what they did. Under no circumstances could she allow those sick monsters to get their hands on Matthew.

She swiped the tears off her cheeks and set the cartoons aside. The only other
souvenir
she had kept was the agreement she had signed. From what Decker had revealed, Howard was shown a different agreement, one that stated that she received a large sum of money. Either they had changed the wording after she signed it, or they forged her signature to a separate document. If they had forged her signature, they probably also had forged Howard's on the agreement she had.

Looking back on it, Russ had helped them with that as well. Apparently, the only truth he had told her was that Decker had offered him money to convince her to sign the agreement. If only she had realized that everything else he said had been a lie. If only she had refused to let him stay with her. If only she'd—

She stopped herself from continuing along that route. It was negative, futile thinking and she couldn't afford even one second of that.

Her eyes scanned the agreement and darted back to the one sentence Russ had used to convince her to sign it:
Barbara Mancuso and Howard Hamilton IV shall be henceforth absolved from any and all promises made or implied to one or the other.
When she had first read it, she wasn't sure that could be applied to their child and she wasn't any more certain now, but it was better than nothing.

"Maw? Are you okay?"

Barbara's head jerked up. Matt looked both concerned and annoyed. "I'm sorry, honey. I had to look something up." She still wanted to have that talk with him, but she decided to put it off until her nerves calmed down a bit. She slid the drawings and agreement back into the envelope and put everything back in the box. "Why don't you do your homework while I warm up the leftover casserole."

"I don't have any," he said, still looking at her curiously.

"Good. Then you can set the table."

After lunch, she encouraged Matt to go play a video game while she cleaned up the kitchen. As soon as he seemed sufficiently occupied, she called the police station and left a message for Dani to contact her. She wouldn't have bothered to call the police to report a break-in with such flimsy evidence, but she knew Dani wouldn't dismiss it with a smug expression like some other, male police officers had in earlier years. Dani would know she wasn't just another paranoid woman.