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“No matter what your family thinks of me, I am sorry your father was murdered. Even he didn’t deserve an end like that.”
She pursed her lips. “Even he? Mr. Dawson, are you bent on offending me?”
He exhaled hard and shoved a hand through his hair, standing it up in a sexy mess all over his head. An urge to reach out and smooth it crossed her palm. She dismissed the impulse with dismay.
He swore under his breath. “I’m going about this all wrong. Please let me start over.”
She settled deeper into the embrace of the leather chair, waiting to see where Gabe was taking this. She kind of enjoyed watching him squirm. She’d had to spend most of the past decade listening to her father rant about how this man had stolen Merris Oil’s future, and done his best to run her family into the ground. And while her father had been a hothead, prone to making generalizations, he also got things right, sometimes.
“Willa—Miss Merris. I truly am sorry your father has passed away. No matter what our disagreements might have been, I did not wish the man ill personally.”
She blinked, studying him anew. His sincerity surprised her. “Thank you,” she murmured.
“I do have another reason for coming to see you today beyond expressing my sympathy for your loss.”
“Indeed?” Curiosity stirred in the midst of her caution. What on earth could he want here? She flashed back for a second to her teen years when she’d nightly dreamed of him sweeping her into his arms and eloping with her. The absurdity of the notion now almost made her smile. Gabe Dawson was a well-known playboy and self-avowed bachelor. He’d been divorced for many years, in fact. Plenty of time had passed for him to find a wife if he was planning on having another one. Not the marrying kind, obviously. Just as well. He’d probably be a completely insufferable control freak in a relationship.
She tuned back in to what he was saying so earnestly. “…tried to speak to your father about a sensitive business matter a few weeks ago, but that conversation… didn’t go well. Unfortunately, the underlying issue remains unresolved.”
A snort escaped her. The way she heard it, the two men had engaged in a violent shouting match that ended with her father throwing a punch at Gabe in the middle of the prestigious and private Petroleum Club in Dallas. What on earth could have provoked her father so horribly? John Merris had been a highly intelligent man, and he knew darn good and well not to make such a scene in the middle of a tough re-election campaign.
Gabe continued doggedly, “As you may recall, I started life as an oil geologist. And as such, I have more than a working knowledge of assessing oil fields.”
Her brows knit in a frown. Where was he going with this? Assessing oil fields? “Mr. Dawson, I have nothing to do with the day-to-day operation of Merris Oil. Perhaps you should be having this conversation with Larry Shore. I believe he’s going to take over as temporary CEO in my father’s place. Or you could speak with the Ward family. They hold a significant minority share in my father’s company.”
“Please. Hear me out.”
She nodded her somewhat confused assent and he continued. “I happen to own the mineral rights to a parcel of land next to Merris Oil’s Vacarro Field.”
Even she knew what the Vacarro Field was. It was Merris Oil’s cash cow—a stretch of oil field about an hour’s drive west of Vengeance that churned out millions of barrels of oil each year and was the main source of her family’s income.
“Dawson Exploration just completed a survey of the Vacarro II parcel, and it so happens that the seismic data from my land also paints a fairly complete picture of your father’s field.”
“And?”
“And I took a look at it,” he announced heavily.
She frowned. Okay. Seismic data wasn’t classified or secret. It wasn’t illegal to survey anywhere if a person felt like paying to look at mineral rights they didn’t own. When Gabe didn’t continue, she said, “I fail to see why you felt obliged to share this with me.”
His frown deepened. “I gather, then, that your father didn’t speak with you about the state of the Vaccaro Field before his passing?”
“What about it?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them again and pointed their pained green depths at her. “The field’s played out. In another year at most, Merris Oil’s Vacarro wells are going to run dry. All of them. Frankly, I’m shocked they’re still producing.”
Played out? Dry? Blank shock closed in on her, much like it had when she’d gotten the call two weeks ago that John Merris was dead.
Gabe leaned forward and took her hand in his. She supposed hers must be cold, because his fingers felt like a warm, gentle vise around hers. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.
“The Vacarro Field is done. And the way I hear it, most of Merris Oil’s income is derived from that field. Very soon, your family’s primary revenue source is going to disappear. I couldn’t in good conscience withhold this information from you and your mother if, as I suspected, John failed to share it with you.”
The glass horse in her soul did shatter then. It was too much. Every direction she turned, another disaster ambushed her. Any one of them was overwhelming, but in combination, they were drowning her.
First, the completely shocking attack by James Ward. Her father’s insistence that she not go to the police, not make a scandal that could kill his chances for re-election, that she cancel all her public appearances until the swelling in her face had gone down and the bruises faded. John Merris had hidden her away like she was the one at fault, and not the victim of a vicious attack.
And then there’d been her father’s horrifying and unsolved murder, part of a triple homicide for goodness’ sake, followed by her mother’s complete mental collapse. And now this. Her family was teetering on the verge of financial ruin.
Pulling her hand away from his, she folded her arms across her middle and hung on for dear life, so sick to her stomach she thought she might throw up.
How could Gabe do this to her? Why now? Was it some sort of plot by fate to destroy her? Or maybe… a terrible thought occurred to her… maybe this was Gabe’s final revenge. He might not have managed to ruin John Merris, but he could finish off the man’s family.
Gabe probably couldn’t wait to rush right over here, her father’s body barely in the ground, to spill this devastating news to her. She’d heard he’d been summoned from somewhere halfway around the world when his ex-wife had been reported missing two weeks ago. No one knew if she was dead, too, as part of the murder spree, or maybe kidnapped. Supposedly, he’d been in an all-fired hurry to get back to Vengeance over the news. But concern for the woman he obviously still loved wasn’t enough to keep him from gloating over his archenemy’s grave.
Her voice barely above a whisper, she said, “I thought better of you, Mr. Dawson. I can’t believe you would be so crass as to tell me this on the very day I buried my father. I hope you are happy. Not only did you outlive my father, but now you’ve gotten to fire the final shot in your feud with him. I guess you win.”
Gabe’s jaw went slack and he leaped to his feet. Instinctively, she matched the gesture and stood up, which had the effect of bringing them chest to chest. She was nearly five-foot-eight, but he still towered over her.
Her voice gained a little strength. “What have my mother and I ever done to you to deserve you taking your hatred for my father out on her and me in this way?”
“It’s not hatred,” he sputtered. “I thought you ought to know before you make any major financial decisions….”
Before she realized what he was going to do, he took a quick step forward and wrapped his arms around her. His body was big and strong and so very masculine against hers… and scared the living hell out of her.
She tore away from him in ill-disguised panic and squawked, “I’ll thank you, Mr. Dawson, never to darken my family’s doorstep again.”
His hands fell to his sides and he looked bewildered as she cleared her throat and gathered herself to announce more strongly, “While I have no intention of continuing my father’s feud with you, neither will I disrespect his memory by entertaining you any longer under his roof. I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”
Gabe looked deep into her eyes, and she forced herself not to look away, not to blush, not to reveal her terror at being this close to a man. She noted that her entire body was trembling. She hated being this afraid. But Gabe Dawson frightened the living daylights out of her.
“I swear, Willa. I meant no harm. I just thought you ought to know, and there never was going to be a good time to tell you. I’m truly sorry to be the bearer of bad news.” With that, he turned and strode out of the library, leaving her standing and staring at nothing.
Was he telling the truth? Was the entire house of cards that was her life about to come crashing down around her and her mother? She’d caught a few whispers of her father pulling a lot of cash out of Merris Oil to make up shortfalls in his campaign fund-raising. If he’d gutted the company and the Vacarro wells weren’t going to replenish the coffers, what was she going to do?
She wasn’t worried about herself. She had her job as a kindergarten teacher and she lived relatively modestly. But her mother? What would Minnie do? The woman hadn’t worked a day in her entire pampered life and wouldn’t have the first idea how to rein in her lavish lifestyle. The family name would be ruined. And Lord knew, in a town like Vengeance, Texas, appearances were everything.
Forty miles outside of Dallas, it was a hidden enclave of North Texas’s social elite, rife with sprawling ranches and rustic mansions for when folks wanted to “get away” from the Big D. Which was to say, Dallas’s bored and rich came to Vengeance to play. Longhorn cattle roamed their pastures and expensive quarter horses stood in their barns. They wore designer cowboy boots and thousand-dollar-a-pair jeans, hosted lavish, catered barbecues and called it the simple life.
She much preferred a classroom full of noisy five-year-olds to the social rat race. However, her father’s business and political position made being a mere schoolteacher an impossibility for her. She was expected to make campaign appearances, do the social circuit of parties and fund-raisers, smile in the background of television commercials and never, ever cause a scandal.
Even if the son of an old family friend raped her, she thought bitterly.
The dark-paneled library walls closed in on her all of a sudden, and she hurried out of the room, through the foyer and grand dining room and burst outside through the French doors. The broad, covered patio, with its deeply cushioned sofas, lazily turning ceiling fans, and flat-screen TV mounted high under the eaves mocked her with their casual display of wealth. Wealth that was evaporating even as she stood here.
She ran down the wide steps into the garden—the one thing on earth her mother seemed to truly care about. It was as lush and gorgeous as any botanical garden, with winding walkways through raised beds overflowing with roses and late-season daisies, re-blooming azaleas, and even a few of Willa’s favorite gardenias blooming out of season.
How George, the gardener, managed to coax the white, elegant gardenias into bloom for months on end, she had no idea. It probably helped that her mother had built him a commercial quality greenhouse at the back of the nearly two acres of backyard, hidden behind a tall fence covered with Carolina jessamine. The jessamine bloomed in the very earliest spring in a splash of sweet-scented yellow. But even now, a faint hint of its perfume clung to the vines.
What was she going to do? Willa was the executor of her father’s estate, much to everyone’s surprise, and Larry Shore’s immense chagrin. She was supposed to take care of all this, to safeguard it for her mother and for any hypothetical offspring Willa might produce someday. Although at the rate she was going, a boyfriend wasn’t in her near future, let alone children.
She sank onto a concrete bench tucked beneath the spreading boughs of a chinquapin oak and hugged her middle, curling in on herself in misery at the thought of dating ever again. She was damaged goods. James Ward might not have taken her virginity, but the bastard had certainly taken her innocence. Her ability to trust men.
The whole world was caving in on her. John Merris was gone, her financial security ruined, her personal life destroyed. She had no one to turn to, nowhere to go, no escape. The vultures were circling, all right.
An inhuman scream, shrill and panicked, shocked her out of her pity party. The noise cut off sharply, which was almost more alarming than the scream itself. Willa jolted to her feet. That sounded like it had come from near the koi pond. She raced toward the far corner of the garden, her heart in her throat. It sounded like a woman had just been murdered. Was her mother okay?
She skidded to a stop as George waved her back. He was bent over something in the rocks above the pond. Water tumbled merrily through the jumble of stones and into the pool below, masking his raspy voice. “Stay back, Miss Willa. You don’t wanna see this.”
“What is it, George?” she asked frantically.
“Rabbit. Dead.”
She frowned, looking around the otherwise serene garden. “How did it die?” There was too much tree cover here for a hawk to have gotten it, and coyotes wouldn’t show themselves at this time of day, let alone this close to a human habitation.
“Head’s ripped off,” he answered shortly. “Nasty piece of work.”
There’d been a predator in the garden? Where was it now? This side of the garden was bordered by a forest of nearly ten acres’ sprawl. It would be easy to disappear into the trees from here. “Why would some critter sneak into Mom’s garden in broad daylight to kill a rabbit?” she demanded. “That makes no sense, whatsoever.”
“I dunno, Miss. I’m just sayin’ it ain’t got a head, and it looks like somethin’ tore it clean off. You go on back to the house now, Miss Willa. I’ll get a shovel and clean this up.”
“You’ll hose down the spot? It would upset Mother to see blood.”
“Of course,” he muttered, frowning down at the mess at his feet.
God, even the safety of her mother’s garden had been destroyed! She walked toward the house, her steps getting faster and faster until she broke into a shambling run. She felt eyes staring at her, malevolent and evil. Creeped out beyond belief, she sprinted the rest of the way to the house.
She burst into the kitchen, panting, its pickled pine cabinets and cheery yellow walls incongruous in the face of her terror. She dashed away the tears streaming down her face.
Louise looked up from unloading the dishwasher as Willa came to a stop. “Oh, there you are, Willy girl. The sheriff called a minute ago. He wants you to come down to the station in the morning.”
Great. Now what?
Chapter 3
Gabe took a deep breath and reminded himself yet again not to lose his temper. But the young police officer seated across the steel table from him was doing his level best to drive Gabe crazy. This was the third time they’d called him down here to ask him the exact same questions as the first two times he’d been here.
“Tell me one more time, Mr. Dawson, what you and Senator Merris argued about at the Petroleum Club.”
He sighed. He knew what they were doing. Get a person to tell the same story three times, and if it changed each time, the person was lying. If it stayed exactly the same, the person was probably telling the truth.
“I went to the club because I knew John Merris would be there. I offered to buy his company from him.”
“And that’s why he lost his temper and slugged you?”
Gabe shrugged. “More or less. He seemed insulted at the amount I offered him.”
“Was it your intent to insult him?”
“I offered him more than a fair price for Merris Oil. He just didn’t happen to agree with me on what constituted a fair price.”
“And that’s why he hit you?”
“I honestly don’t know, Officer Radebaugh. You’d have to ask him.”
“Senator Merris is dead.”
Duh. “I’m aware of that,” Gabe replied drily. The cop stared at him, and Gabe didn’t bite on the tactic to get him to babble to fill the silence. The stalemate stretched out for close to a minute, ending only when the door to the interrogation room burst open.
“Deputy Green,” Gabe said evenly. Green was a good ol’ boy who’d been on the Vengeance police force ever since Gabe could remember. He’d hassled Gabe plenty as a teen, but then in fairness to Green, he’d hassled the police plenty back then, too. He was a little surprised Green hadn’t been named acting sheriff when Sheriff Peter Burris was found dead next to Senator Merris. The third victim was a young man, recently married, who’d been in town to visit his family. Although rumors were running rampant, no one had figured out yet how the three men—or at least their deaths—were connected.
“Dawson,” Green replied as surly as ever.
“Is there anything more I can do to help you with your investigation, gentlemen?” Gabe looked back and forth between the two cops, neither of whom would meet his eyes. They wanted him to be guilty so bad they could taste it, but the poor bastards couldn’t figure out for the life of them how to pin the recent murders on him. Particularly since he’d been in Malaysia when his assistant and then the cops called to tell him his ex-wife had been kidnapped. Pretty hard to commit murders when a guy was literally halfway around the world from the victims. As alibis went, it was pretty damned ironclad.
Green finally growled, “Don’t leave town, Mr. Dawson.”
“Until my ex-wife is found and released, I’m not going anywhere,” he declared. He’d been divorced from Melinda for nearly a decade, but she’d been his wife. He still felt responsible for her safety. Of course, she would scoff and call him a Neanderthal for thinking he had to take care of the little woman.
But he couldn’t help it. He’d been raised to open doors and hold chairs for ladies, and yes, to look out for their safety. Melinda could just get over it. Although, she pretty much had when she’d divorced him. The old pain of her betrayal of their marriage vows spiked through him again. Damn. He kept thinking it would get better. Hurt less. But it never did.
“If you’ve got nothing more for me, gentlemen, I’ve got a company to run.” No harm in reminding them he wasn’t some local punk from the wrong side of the tracks anymore. Gabe stood up and Radebaugh stood hastily as well, knocking over his chair. Deputy Green looked chagrined as the young cop clumsily righted the chair. Amused, Gabe watched Green beat a retreat.
Officer Radebaugh escorted Gabe into the main station, where a dozen messy, paper-laden desks were huddled. Gabe was startled to spot a familiar pair of slender shoulders and strawberry-blond French twist at the far end of the room. What was Willa Merris doing here? Probably getting an update on the investigation into her father’s murder, or maybe answering more questions. Of course, she didn’t get hauled into an interrogation room, and treated like a criminal. That pleasure had been reserved for him, apparently.
The cop opened the front door for him, and Gabe recoiled at the crowd of reporters clustered at the bottom of the steps. “What’s up with the mob?” he asked his escort.
Radebaugh glanced over his shoulder and then muttered under his breath, “They probably got wind of what Willa Merris is up to.”
“What’s she up to?” Gabe muttered back, not moving his lips.
“We asked her to come in to answer a few questions, but when she got here, she announced she wanted to file charges against James Ward.”
James Ward, as in the golden boy of Vengeance, Texas? Now that John Merris was dead, the Wards were the preeminent family in town, and James was the heir apparent to the family’s fortune, power and social position. Not to mention everyone loved the guy. Betting types were picking him to be the successor to John Merris’s political career. Gabe had always found Ward a little slimy in that friendly, politician way, but a decent guy, overall.
Surprised, Gabe asked, “What’s she charging him with?”
“Assault.”
Gabe’s jaw dropped. “As in he attacked her?”
“Yup.”
Well, that certainly explained the way she’d reacted when he’d tried to hug her yesterday. She’d yanked away like he’d tried to kill her instead of offer a little comfort.
“James Ward?” Gabe couldn’t help asking. He’d known the heir to the Ward fortune for most of his life, and he had a hard time believing that the fun-loving, charming young man had an angry side, let alone a violent side. James was always the center of attention and popular with all the girls. “When did this happen?”
“She says it happened a month ago. Not a shred of proof. Sheriff’s trying to talk her out of pressing charges because it’s gonna boil down to a he said-she said, and she’s gonna lose.”
“Why’s she going to lose?” Gabe asked.
