Wicked Need (The Wicked Horse Series Book 3) (15 page)

“What a
fucking bitch,” Rand mutters.

“It’s
funny,” I say in reflection. “I left home when I was
seventeen, didn’t finish high school, and ended up on the
streets for a bit. And still… it was better than what I had. I
never had someone care for me before, and that didn’t change
whether I was in her house or sleeping on some strange dude’s
couch in exchange for a blow job. The difference is that when I was
with her, I still always expected she’d care a little. As much
as she let me down, over and over again, I always still expected it
of her. And that means I was repetitively hurt when I didn’t
get it. At least on the streets, I had no expectations that anyone
could smash.”

Rand’s
hand comes out, and he takes mine. He pulls it across the cab, making
me lean a little toward him, and gives a soft kiss to the inside of
my wrist. “Your mom sounds like a vile person. I’m
thinking one of the best things you ever did was leaving when you
were young. You’re in a much better place now that you’re
rid of her.”

I give a cold,
bitter laugh, and shake my head. “I’m
not rid of her. That woman became a leech on me once I married
Samuel.”

“Come again?”
he asks with a head tilt.

“She saw in
the society pages that I got married. Not two days later, she’s
at our house, asking for money.”

“Did you give
it to her?” Rand asks.

“Yeah, I did,”
I admit to him, but without shame.

“Why?”

“Because it
made me feel superior to her. Is that bad?”

Rand gives a chuckle
and squeezes my hand. “You
were already superior to her, Cat. That money didn’t prove
anything.”

I squeeze his hand
back. “Maybe
not, but I couldn’t say no. She was my mom, after all.”

“Amazing,”
Rand murmurs as we fly down the highway. “That you would still
have any empathy for a woman who treated you so badly throughout your
life. I think that makes you absolutely and perfectly amazing.”

“Or stupid,”
I mutter, and Rand laughs.

“Maybe a
little foolish, but never stupid,” he offers.

“I’ll
take that,” I tell him with a grin. “Of course, she
called the minute she heard Samuel had died. I’m sure she saw
that in the paper. I figured I’d be hearing something from her,
asking about my inheritance, and that’s exactly why she called.
You’d be proud. I put her off and told her I didn’t have
time to deal with her. Ironic it wasn’t but a week later and I
was all but homeless. Good thing she’s not asking for money
now, huh?”

“Yeah, well,
you better not give her one dime of that money you got for your
jewelry. You earned that the hardest of ways and that’s for
your future, not hers.”

“Agreed,”
I say as I see a looming sign growing closer.

Las Vegas - 56
Miles.

Almost there.

And then I’ll
hopefully find out what my future really holds.

Rand

“Big step up
from my little trailer in the desert, huh?” Cat says on a low
whisper as we stand before the front portico of one of the biggest
houses I’ve ever seen in my life.

The house Cat shared
with Samuel is monstrous. She had told me it was eleven-thousand
square feet. To be that big, it comes in three chunks with a main
center section and two wings that flank at a slight angle inward.
Done in taupe stucco, brown brick, and red tile, it fits into the
desert scenery well.

It’s
nine AM. We decided that if we were going to enter the house, we were
going to do it as if she belonged there. Without really knowing what
Samuel’s will truly says, it’s more than plausible that
Cat has every right to be here. We thought it would look far less
suspicious if done in the bright light of day.

Thus, we got to the
hotel yesterday afternoon, a lower class, budget hotel Cat chose that
sat on the outskirts of Vegas. Since she was insisting on paying, I
had to let her choose. Rest assured, if it was in my hands, we’d
be at the Bellagio, but I’m honoring her need to do some of
this on her own. It’s important to her pride.

“Ready to do
this?” I ask as we stand side by side on the bottom step.
Before us stands double doors made of solid wood, and either her key
will work or it won’t. Same for the security code.

“Ready as I’ll
ever be,” she says firmly, and then reaches out with her hand
to take mine. It feels natural. It makes me remember how much I
missed being part of a unit.

Together, we walk up
the steps.

Cat told me on the
way here that Samuel bought this house about twenty years ago after
his first wife died. Because she was the love of his life, he
couldn’t
bear to stay in the family home where they raised their two sons.
Since he moved in, Cat had been his fourth wife, the other two before
her outliving their usefulness after they reached the age of
twenty-eight. Cat told me she wondered if Samuel did to them what he
did to her.

I didn’t
offer an opinion because I think we both know he did.

When we reach the
front door, Cat releases her hold on me and digs into her purse slung
crossways over her chest and resting at her hip. She pulls out a set
of keys, flips through them, and chooses a gold-colored one that
doesn’t
look much different from the others.

With a deep breath,
she reaches out and slides the key in. Twisting her wrist, she lets
out a huge sigh of relief when the lock turns. She looks at me, her
lips peeling into a wide grin and her eyes sparkling with excitement.
I smile back at her, relieved of course that her key still works, but
knowing deep down that it doesn’t mean shit. She may have still
been cut out of Samuel’s will, but the locks just haven’t
been changed yet.

Cat pushes the door
open, and we both step into a cavernous foyer aglow with natural
light from the huge, arched window above the door. A beep from the
security panel beside the door catches my attention, and I watch as
Cat puts in the code. It shuts the alarm off, and we both let out an
audible sigh of relief.

The house is
sparsely decorated—minimalistic. It would be easy to say that
was so because Samuel was a bachelor for a long time and didn’t
care what his house looked like, but I’m going to guess it’s
because Samuel didn’t get much pleasure out of life and didn’t
care what his house looked like. From what I know about the asshole,
he derived pleasure from watching his wife be degraded, so I doubt
fancy artwork and priceless knick-knacks would do much for him.

“Come on. His
office is this way,” Cat whispers, reaching back for my hand to
pull me toward the stairs.

I immediately place
my palm against hers, but ask, “Why
are you whispering?”

“I don’t
know,” she rasps back with a giggle. “I guess because I’m
not sure if I’m actually breaking and entering, or not.”

“Let’s
assume not and talk in our normal voices,” I prod her. Although
she’s cute as fuck doing that, it’s also setting me on
edge a bit, making me feel like we shouldn’t be here, and I’d
rather take the optimistic route that we are definitely allowed.

Cat had assured me
there was no full-time staff who lived in the house. While Samuel
employed a chef, housekeeper, and an attendant for his personal
needs, none of those employees lived in residence. As far as we knew,
Kevin was still back in Jackson, probably never suspecting Cat would
come here to search the house. Richard was probably oblivious to
everything but we didn’t know that for sure. Cat decided not to
reach out to him, mainly because she figured he wasn’t
going to help her. He may not have any clue what Kevin was doing from
Jackson, but then again, he might have full knowledge. We’d
never know, so why alert him any further that Cat was questioning the
validity of the will?

Now, it certainly
can’t
be helped she let Kevin know she was questioning it, but we’re
sort of banking on his ego and his complete underestimation of Cat to
keep him happily in the dark. So if we’re lucky, he’s
probably on a fishing trip right now on the Snake River. Cat says
that’s one of the reason’s he goes to Jackson, and if
there’s a God above, maybe he’ll fall out of the fucking
boat and drown.

Cat leads me up a
curved staircase done in deep mahogany to a large second-floor
landing. Hallways branch left and right…
entryways into the wings of the house.

“My room was
that way.” She points to the right, and then back to the left.
“Samuel’s that way.”

I find it
interesting she referenced her room in the past tense. Not sure if
that’s
because she doesn’t believe this house is hers or that she
doesn’t intend to come back here regardless. I’ll ask her
about that later, but for now, I follow her straight ahead from the
landing to a set of double doors that she pushes open to a huge
office.

It’s
what I would expect of an egomaniac, billionaire hotelier.
Expensively paneled walls, luxurious silk rugs, ornately carved desk,
and the faint musk of cigars in the air.

“Samuel spent
a lot of time in here,” Cat murmurs in a grateful tone as she
drops my hand and walks in. Glad he spent time in here and not
bothering her, I’m sure.

She heads straight
for his desk and pulls back the massive leather chair on wheels so
she can sit down in it. Turning to a side drawer, she pulls it open
and starts rifling through. I walk up to her and stand behind the
chair to the side, watching her progress. She pulls out a thick pack
of stapled papers and hands them to me, saying, “Our
pre-nup. The will trumps anything in the pre-nup as best I can
remember, but we should take pictures of this as well.”

Before we came in
here, we agreed we wouldn’t
take any documents with us. Our main goal was to verify if the will
cutting Cat out existed, and to look at the current will if we could
find it. Because there’s not a copier in Samuel’s office,
we’ll have to take a picture of each page with her iPhone.

I hold the pre-nup
without looking at it. I don’t
care what deal Cat made with her devil of a husband. I only care
about her not getting screwed over right now.

“Bingo,”
she shouts with glee and pulls out another thick document. She lays
it on the desk, and I step in closer to look at it over her shoulder.
It’s titled “Revocable Trust Agreement and Pour-Over
Will”.

“Quite a fancy
name for a will,” I mutter.

She nods. “Trust
agreement… will… I’m assuming they’re just
different names for the same thing; how to distribute his estate.”

Cat starts to skim
through it, her finger sliding down the page as she scans and flips
pages.

“Kevin is the
trustee, but I knew that. Just means he’ll administer the
estate. Blah, blah, blah, blah,” she says as she breezes past
paragraphs entitled
Debts
& Expenses
and
Administrative
Powers of Fiduciaries
.
My eyes actually start to cross when her finger stops and she says,
“This is the paragraph.”

I lean over closer
and see the word
Residuary
.
Cat reads out loud, “Upon my death, I direct my trustee to
transfer five-million dollars to my wife, Catherine Lyons Vaughn.
Pursuant to our pre-nuptial agreement, she will have no ownership
rights or interests in any of my real property at the time of my
death, with the exception of the house in Jackson, Wyoming. I further
direct my trustee to ensure transfer of title and deed of said
property to my wife.”

“Did you know
that was in his will?” I ask her.

She nods. “Not
the exact details, but he told me he would leave me with enough money
to sustain me as well as a house. I didn’t know it would be the
Jackson house. I suppose that was his way of reminding me in death
how much he loved taking me there.”

I wince at the
bitterness in her voice. There’s
no way she’d ever want to stay in a place that held such
terrible memories for her.

Cat flips quickly
through the rest of the document to the very end, where I can see the
original ink of Samuel’s
signature as well as a notary public seal.

“He signed
this two weeks after we were married,” she says, still looking
at the document.

“We need to go
through the rest of his stuff,” I tell her as I squat down at
the drawer that’s still open and start rifling through the
contents. “If there’s another will or trust agreement or
whatever the fuck you call it dated after that one, you’re
screwed.”

“But if
there’s not, Kevin’s screwed,” she says, and my
head turns toward her because of the icy tone in her voice. She
narrows her eyes at me and in a voice bristling with anger, she says,
“That asshole kicked me out over five million dollars and a
house? When Samuel’s estate is worth billions? What a fucking
douche bag.”

I give her a wry
smile. “I
think it was more about controlling you than the money. The fact he
wanted you to stay at the house tells me all I need to know. He was
banking on you crawling to him for help.”

“Bet he was
stunned I didn’t,” she says quietly.

Nodding in
agreement, I turn back to the drawer, eager to get this over with and
get the hell out. I start flipping through hanging folders containing
tax returns, bank statements, and deeds of trust. Folder after folder
of the story of Samuel Vaughn’s
wealthy life.

“Thank you,
Rand,” Cat murmurs. It’s so soft I barely hear it, yet my
entire body feels like it’s been punched by the depth of
emotion in her words. My head rises and turns to her as she sits in
the massive leather chair that swallows her up. “If you hadn’t
have taken me in, I might have gone to Kevin for help.”

“No way,”
I say with a soft smile. I don’t reach out and touch her like I
want to, because I don’t want to give any credence to her
suspicion of what she might have done. I know Cat. She’s
stronger than that and would have never given Kevin the ability to
control her. So I stay reserved so she knows it’s a ludicrous
thought. “The Cat Lyons I know wouldn’t have ever done
that. You would have figured another way. Hell, you did figure
another way. You sold your jewelry and you came to Vegas to find the
truth. So fuck you very much, Kevin Vaughn. This woman doesn’t
need you.”