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“Nope,” Jena said, closing her notepad. “I think that about covers it.”
“For me, too,” Dulcy said.
Marie sat forward and leaned her forearms against the table. “Actually, I have something.”
Three pairs of eyes focused on her, making her wish she hadn’t said anything.
“Well, it’s not something in the traditional sense of having something. It’s not a new case or anything…”
Jena elbowed her. “Get to the point, Bertelli.”
Marie grimaced at her and sighed. “I just thought that you all should know that the Treasury Department is questioning my father in connection with a racketeering charge.”
Dead silence. Marie could virtually hear her own heart beating as she waited for some sort of verbal response. And waited. And waited.
She cleared her throat. “The details are a little sketchy yet,” she said. “But I’m in contact with his attorney. Basically, all I know is that two days ago my father was pulled in for preliminary questioning at which time he contacted an attorney.”
“Not you,” Jena said quietly.
Marie looked down at the table where she was worrying her hands. She put her hands in her lap. “No.”
At the end of the table, Dulcy shifted in her chair, not an easy move given her ever widening girth. “Who did he retain?”
“Ian Kilborn.”
“Who?” Jena asked, leaning closer.
Marie stared at her. “Ian Kilborn.”
Jena stared at her as if she’d gone soft in the head, then looked at Dulcy who gave an odd sort of smile before averting her gaze and pretending an interest in the files in front of her.
“Who’s Ian Kilborn?” Barry asked.
Jena waved her hand. “We all grew up together in the same neighborhood. You wouldn’t know him from there, of course, but you might be familiar with him by the cases he’s represented lately.”
Dulcy nodded. “There’s Raphael Mendoza…”
“Serial robber who steals women’s intimate apparel,” Jena added.
Marie sank lower in her chair.
“That guy who killed his priest after he confessed to killing his wife,” Dulcy counted off on her fingers.
“Jamieson.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
Jena lifted a finger. “Then there’s the Britney Hiawatha case.”
This lifted Barry’s snow-white brows, making him look more like James Brolin than Sean Connery. “The prostitute who…”
He didn’t need to finish, because the story made news due to the sheer gruesomeness of the details. Hiawatha had basically turned any johns who didn’t pay her into modern-day eunuchs.
And if Ian hadn’t gotten his clients off altogether, he’d gotten the prosecutors to cop to lesser charges after pulling a few courtroom stunts that had nearly gotten him disbarred.
“Oh, he’s good,” Barry said, shaking his head. “Very good. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize the name. Kilborn, right? Kill ’em Kilborn.”
Marie rubbed her forehead. It was bad enough that this was the man her father had hired. This was also the guy she fantasized about sleeping with while…well, while she was sleeping and had no control over where her thoughts ventured.
Good Lord.
“You and Kilborn grew up together?” Barry asked.
“In the same neighborhood,” Marie said. “We weren’t exactly…friends.”
She caught Jena giving Dulcy one of those “really?” faces she hated and felt the urge to elbow her friend so hard she’d fall backward in her chair.
“Oh,” Dulcy said.
But she hadn’t said it in the way Marie might have expected. Instead, she seemed surprised by something that didn’t have anything to do with the present conversation.
Marie looked at her. Dulcy’s face had gone white and she was clutching her stomach.
“Are you all right?” Marie asked, getting up from her chair and hurrying toward her friend.
Then Dulcy smiled, so brightly it nearly hurt to look at her. “I’m…fine. I just felt the baby kick.” She laughed. “I mean, at five months, I’ve felt him kick before, but not this insistently.” She rubbed her palms over her stomach. “Ezzie jokes that I’m going to have a horse. I’m beginning to think she may be right.”
Ezzie was Esmeralda, Dulcy and Quinn’s housekeeper, although she was more family than hired help, especially since she didn’t get paid. Marie got the heebies whenever she was around the old Indian woman because Ezzie looked at her as if trying to figure something out. Marie never stuck around long enough to find out what.
“That’s why I’m never having children,” Jena said, closing her notepad again. “I don’t want any little hellion kicking around inside of me for nine months.”
“They don’t kick until after the first trimester,” Dulcy corrected her.
Jena shrugged. “Six months, nine. Both too long.”
Dulcy took Marie’s hand and rested it against her round belly. As she always did when she touched her friend’s stomach, Marie wondered at how hard and solid the mass was. “Do you feel him?”
Marie did. She gasped and nearly drew her hand away at the force of the kick.
Barry chuckled as he got up and headed for the door. “I think that’s my cue to leave the room.”
Dulcy looked at him. “Don’t you dare, Bartholomew. You get over here and feel your honorary grandchild along with everyone else.”
Marie drew back from the group, watching as if from a distance. Her brother Frankie Jr.’s wife had had their two children while Marie was in L.A. Though she’d flown in for the births and the baptisms, she hadn’t actually experienced the pregnancies with her sister-in-law. To watch one of her best friends go through the experience…well, she felt humbled and awed. And maybe, just maybe, a little envious.
“It’s a girl,” Jena said confidently after shaking her hand as if she’d just touched a bagful of goo instead of her friend’s stomach. “I don’t know why you don’t want to find out what sex it is, Dulc. You keep calling it a ‘he.’ What if it is a girl?”
Dulcy gave a long, happy sigh. “I use ‘he’ just to keep things simple. Quinn and I would be very happy if it were a girl.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and went through the maneuvers required for her to stand. “But Ezzie’s adamant about my having a boy.”
Marie shuddered. “That woman gives me the creeps.”
“That’s funny,” Dulcy said, waving Barry away when he tried to help her get up. “She reminds me a lot of your grandmother.”
Marie widened her eyes. So that’s why she felt strange around Ezzie. She realized with a start that her friend was right. Ezzie was exactly like Marie’s Grandmother Maria, after whom she’d been named.
Yikes.
“So,” Dulcy said, gathering her things from the table in front of her, “what happens with your father from here?”
Her father? Oh, her father.
“Um, he meets with the treasury agents tomorrow.”
“Are you going?” Jena asked.
“No. But Ian’s going to fill me in on everything.”
“Mmm.”
Marie glared at her friend. “Mmm, what?”
Jena shared another one of those looks with Dulcy. “Nothing. Did I say anything, Dulcy?”
“I didn’t hear you say anything.”
“Oh, piss off, the both of you.”
All three of her friends and fellow attorneys stared at her as if she’d just dyed her hair bleach blonde. Marie instantly wanted to duck under the table until all of them forgot she had just said what she had—which would probably be never because she never swore. Even if the swear word ranked way over on the conservative side.
Barry held up his hands. “I’m out of here. See you guys tomorrow.”
He left the room, leaving Marie behind to stare at her friends.
Great. Just great. First there was everything going on with her father. Now Jena and Dulcy’s shock had turned to acute interest.
She sighed and pushed her curly hair back from her face. “Look, guys, I’m really not up for this right now.”
Jena crossed her arms over her chest. “Funny, because we are.”
“What’s going on, Marie?” Dulcy asked.
Marie stepped to the table and scooped her things into her briefcase. “Can we talk about this tomorrow—”
The sound of raised voices coming from the lobby drew all of their attention.
First Jena, then Dulcy and Marie stepped toward the open conference room door. Given that she was a good four inches shorter than her friends, Marie had to do some maneuvering to see what was going on.
Just outside, by Mona’s desk, Barry and Mona were arguing hotly. Marie tried to follow the rapid-fire words.
“I quit,” Mona said, her voice ringing loud and clear.
Marie raised her brows. Well, that didn’t take much to understand, did it?
All four of them watched as the woman who had been Barry Lomax’s secretary for the past thirty years, and theirs for the past year, took her purse out of her desk drawer and strode toward the door. And that’s where they all stayed well after Mona had left.
“Wow,” Marie said.
Everyone nodded their agreement.
HERE THEY WERE TALKING about the U.S. Treasury Department and the questions the agents had asked Frank Bertelli Sr., and all Ian could think about was that he wanted to have some major sex with Marie so badly he hurt. And the fact that they were in public, sitting at a small round table in a very busy coffee shop located near their offices was not hindering his condition in the least.
It was hard to believe that only a day had passed since he’d last seen her…when he’d nudged her skirt up her remarkable thighs and peeked at her underwear. It seemed more like a week. And the truth of that made his mental state that much worse. He hadn’t wanted anyone this bad since…well, since he’d had Marie eight years ago.
“My father’s accountant’s missing?” Marie asked after mulling over everything Ian had said.
Ian forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand. Not an easy task when Marie had surprised him by showing up at the café in jeans and a T-shirt and a black leather blazer. She’d said she couldn’t concentrate at the firm—something about a missing secretary and a general state of chaos—and had decided to work from home this afternoon. She looked hot. And he wanted to touch her.
He cleared his throat. “In a word, yes.” He leaned forward and shook his leg in an effort to move his pulsing arousal to a more comfortable position. Thankfully his suit pants were baggy enough to conceal the sad shape he was in. “Your father says he didn’t show up for work yesterday morning. Something I didn’t find out until the questioning was well under way.” He turned his coffee cup around to grasp the handle. “I had to do a bit of damage control when that little bit came out.”
“Holy cow,” Marie whispered.
Ian’s gaze dropped to her mouth as she said the words. Damn, but she had a beautiful mouth. The kind of mouth that could take real good care of a guy if she put her mind to it.
“You can, um, say that again,” he said, unsure if he was talking to himself or her.
Marie ran her fingers through her wild red hair several times, then sat back and blew a long breath out of those luscious lips. The fact that she was completely unaware of the carnal direction his thoughts had taken made her all the more attractive. Of course, not many people would be able to see beyond what he had just told her. Which was basically that her father was in deep doo-doo.
Her blue eyes focused on him. “Did they say what the reason was for the suspicion?”
Ian shrugged and took a long sip of his coffee. “Something about discrepancies on your father’s business returns.”
She grimaced.
“And, um, he was also questioned about his connection to someone out of Chicago.”
“Who?”
“James Baldacci.”
“Uncle Jimmy?”
Ian winced, her father’s position looking dimmer and dimmer all the time. “You call Jimmy the Head ‘uncle’?”
Marie looked genuinely perplexed as she leaned forward. “What do you mean, Jimmy the Head?”
She honestly didn’t know.
Ian scratched his head then smoothed his hair back into place. “What do you know about James Baldacci?”
Marie’s gaze narrowed. “Why did you just call him Jimmy the Head?”
“Answer my question first and then I’ll answer yours.”
She picked around the edges of her bran muffin, eating only the pieces that fell off onto her plate. “My father and Uncle Jimmy go back a ways. I think they came over from Italy together.”
“Great.”
“What does that mean?”
He debated telling her, then decided she’d probably get it out of him one way or another. “It means that Jimmy is called the Head because he heads up one of the most powerful crime families in the Midwest.”
Marie had the olive-colored skin that went with her rich Mediterranean heritage. Not that you could tell at that moment because she’d gone as pale as copy paper. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.”
“Holy shit.”
Holy cow to holy shit. Quite a jump for Marie even on a bad day. And fitting. Because Ian had thought exactly the same thing when the agents had asked Frankie Sr. about Jimmy, and Frankie had shrugged and explained that they were friends. Very good friends. Not something one usually went around bragging about, especially to U.S. Treasury agents.
“So what happened to my father’s accountant?”
Ian finished off his coffee, then wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I think the treasury agents believe he’s wearing cement boots at the bottom of a very large pond,” he said from behind his napkin.
But Marie had heard him and looked about a flinch away from flinging her coffee into his face.
“You can’t possibly believe that, can you?” she asked, color returning to her face in full.
“I didn’t say that. I said I think the agents believe that.”
She looked like she’d been physically struck. “Why that’s stupid. Ridiculous. Ludicrous.”
“It’s fact.”
She went silent and still, looking much like a statue as she stared at him in dawning realization.
Ian felt decidedly uncomfortable. All these years and never once had he thought that the joking rumors about Frank Bertelli were true. Don Bertelli, indeed. Hell, the morons among the kids his age had also habitually greeted the Schlachter kid down the street with a Nazi salute. Certainly none of them had ever truly believed he was a Nazi.
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