Claimed: The Dark Christmases Trilogy Page 7

  His efficient tone, combined with his serious expression and nakedness, turned me on. Jasper must have seen the desire in my eyes and understood that my look was the answer to his question. He cracked an impish smile.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’d better go before I choose to push up my meetings.”

  I rolled onto my belly, chuckling as I watched him trot into his walk-in closet. I was happy—one hundred percent filled with bliss. I never believed this could be me. Deep down, I didn’t trust it, but for the moment, I decided to go with it.

  I lay on my back with my eyes closed, picturing how Jasper looked as he walked out of his closet. He had on a pair of nicely tailored navy-blue trousers with a light-blue button-down shirt. The sleeves were folded above his elbows, and the buttons were loose at his chest. He looked so sexy I could hardly stand it. On his way out, he kissed me and once again reminded me that I was his. My mind was floating, and even though I didn’t say it, I could hardly believe that he belonged to me.

  I thought about how Jasper had asked if I had a problem with sitting still and relaxing. His bed was so comfortable. The blanket smelled like him and also like me.

  The most rest I’d ever gotten was when I was heartbroken during the first week and a half of the new year. I smashed my eyes closed and wiped away the memory of lying in bed in my flannel pajamas, lamenting the loss of Jasper Christmas. Suddenly, my eyes popped open. Good energy raced through my body, and I was ready to do exactly what Jasper had suggested.

  First, I stepped into his locker-room-sized shower and used the shampoo that sat on the ledge in the corner. The warm water felt divine. When I was done showering, I decided to really overindulge and took a bath. As I sat in the silky water, I fought the urge to think of my next work task. I was eager to learn what Branson would discover about Benjamin Dow and all the money Jasper had supposedly given to the man to cover up his brother’s crime. I believed Jasper when he said he’d never made payments. Then I thought about Kylie’s fake sources. How could she have done that? I could still hardly believe it, but I couldn’t deny what I’d seen. I wondered what she had to say for herself. The longer I sat in the tub, the more I realized without a shadow of doubt that she was trying to play me. The pieces were right there, ready to be put together. Sure, I was the one who had called her while I was staying at the Christmas mansion. I knew she had a fascination with the family, and I wanted to see if she could help me with the investigation that Bryn had paid me to do. So as far as good luck went, I was the four-leaf clover that had fallen into her lap. I always thought the agreement between her and Jasper was strange. As I’d told Jasper, paying off a coroner would not have destroyed her career. And truthfully, I had never bought that excuse. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed the inside corners as I waited for the disappointment to pass. Yes, Kylie had broken my heart. I thought we were friends. I knew we were friends. I wanted her to prove to me that we were.

  “Eve,” I muttered as I slid the loofah up my calf.

  Why would Kylie insist I give her the name of my contact if she never intended to investigate it? That was proof she was not a phony reporter. Then I groaned, disappointed. She must have known that I was too emotionally involved to hand her a contact who could eventually harm Jasper. I had to catch her in a way in which she couldn’t question my motives. I had to use details that she already believed were solid. And more importantly, I had to start the process of cooking her goose immediately.

  I rose to my feet, but before stepping out of the tub, I stopped to ponder. I couldn’t make it hurt so badly that my actions would ruin her forever. But is there any other way to do it? Oh, the pain in my heart!

  But there was no other course of action. She had taken a new job as a TV host. A TV host was not a reporter. Journalists did the legwork—we combed through records, contacted sources, asked for documents, and attempted to catch our subjects with their hands in the cookie jar, and that was only a smidgen of all the shit we had to do to get the story. Perhaps Kylie had finally arrived and was done pretending to be a real reporter.

  I sat back down, deciding to let things be. I could consider the way she’d stolen that gambling story from me—and then allowed it to die after her deception was discovered—to be water under the bridge. But then I remembered all the emails she’d left me, asking how I was progressing on Chattanooga, and I stood back up. She wasn’t done, at least not with the Christmases. She needed to learn a lesson, and I would be the one to brine, stuff, and roast her over an open fire.

  I had dried my skin, and now I sat on the edge of the bed, constructing a long email in Notes. I made up a story about how a source named Rosie had given me another address in Chattanooga that operated as a full-on brothel. I made up a name for the madam and validated her credentials, saying that this woman, who I called Leanne Dean, had gone on record stating that Randolph Christmas was her premiere client. I added that Leanne couldn’t confirm or deny the fact that other members of the Christmas clan visited the brothel. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was good to add that detail, but I knew it would be fresh meat for her to maul to the bone. I made up names of prostitutes but fed her a few real names of clients so that they could publicly deny her accusations. I gave her dates. Lastly, I told her she couldn’t reach me because I was in hiding and that an editor, whom I called D, was expecting the story before midnight. I added that I just wanted her to know all of this because she had urged me to follow through with my Chattanooga source, and for that, I thanked her.

  Once I was done with the message, I copied it, pasted it into an email, and sent it without delay, making sure to blind copy myself on the correspondence.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” a woman asked.

  I quickly looked toward the doorway. There stood Julia Valentine in a long trench coat over a black business suit. Her attire looked impeccable, but her skin was blotchy and eyes crazed and glassy. It took me a moment to process what she’d just asked.

  “I’m sorry, but what are you doing here?” I asked. After all, I was the girlfriend, and she was not a real fiancée—at least, that was what I’d been told.

  “I can’t believe him,” she muttered as she swept out of the doorway. Then I heard her heels beating the floor as she raced down the hall.

  “What in the world?” I whispered as I hopped to my feet.

  I wanted to follow her, but I was too discombobulated. What the hell just happened? I gnawed on my bottom lip, still unable to figure out how to direct my feet. Then I heard Julia yell about how Jasper had misled her and how he wasn’t supposed to do what he had done to her father.

  “We’re losing everything by the second. How dare you?” she shouted.

  Jasper said something in response.

  “I was falling in love with you. Do you even care about that?”

  He said something that included my name.

  Julia went deathly quiet then cried, “Fuck you Jasper! It won’t work. What you did won’t work!”

  He said something else, and even though I tried, I couldn’t make out his words. I heard more footsteps—heavy, fast ones. Someone was running. Julia kept yelling at someone to get out of her way.

  “I know you love me too. We made love!” she screamed. “We made love!”

  “You’re lying!” he yelled.

  “No, I’m not lying, Holly Henderson! If you can hear me, I’m not lying, you cunt!”

  I gasped. She was purposefully addressing me.

  “Get her the fuck out!” Jasper roared.

  I clenched my stomach as my butt dropped down on the foot of the bed, but it was my heart that ached.

  Chapter Nine

  Jasper ran into the room, his eyes wild with worry. “She was lying. I never touched her. I never wanted to. I couldn’t do it.”

  I felt so vulnerable as I studied him. What Gina had told me that day at the pool echoed in my mind. She’d tried having sex with Jasper several times with no success. “Everyone knows he can’t get it up,” she’d s
aid.

  Jasper approached me with his hands up in surrender and cautiously sat beside me. “She was the one who informed Arthur about our interview for The Rochester Report.”

  I wasn’t surprised, but I did have one nagging question. “Why did she come to your bedroom?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Julia has gotten into the habit of roaming freely through my home. I treated her as a friend just so I could tolerate our arrangement.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

  I rested my hand on his thigh, and he opened his eyes to gaze at my lips.

  “It’s okay, Jasper. I believe you.”

  He cupped my chin and guided my mouth toward his. Our lips embraced as his tongue stroked mine. My mind floated and only made its way back to earth when Jasper ended our kiss to whisper, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I replied in an airy voice.

  His expression turned grave again. “I must let you know, though—today Arthur Valentine learned that his family is losing its fortune at an alarming rate.”

  I frowned hard. “How?”

  “I drained him.”

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding. “That’s what you meant by draining the life out of him?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about the Valentine fortune. “But how? Valentine money is old and strong.”

  Jasper’s brows drew close together, and he thought for a minute. “Thomas Valentine made a mistake when he split his assets among his heirs and didn’t leave his wealth to his most capable descendant.”

  “Right,” I said, taking a moment to recall what I knew about Thomas Valentine. He was the tycoon who’d taken a percentage of the oil industry out of Rockefeller’s hands after the Antitrust Act of 1890 started the dismantling of Standard Oil. Jasper had said that when Thomas died, he split his fortune evenly among his descendants. Together, they agreed to sell their oil interest and split the profits among them. The Valentine fortune had become disjointed, which had been a blessing and curse, depending on who was telling the story. The blessing was that spreading their wealth limited their power, and the Valentines weren’t the most moral individuals on earth. The curse was that as each decade passed, a new crop of Valentines found themselves broke. Conrad Valentine, Arthur’s father, had left his son a diversified portfolio, and that had made Conrad and Arthur some of the strongest Valentines, at least until then.

  “But how did you bankrupt him?” I asked.

  “Methodically,” Jasper said.

  I waited for him to say more, but his lips were pressed shut. That was all he was willing to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that answer—not this time.

  “What’s an example of methodically?”

  He tightened his jaw. “Do you recall the demonstration I gave you the other day?”

  I cocked my head, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—all I could recall was the love we’d made.

  “With the travel magazine?” he asked leadingly.

  I nodded. “Oh, yes. I remember.”

  “I was able to bankrupt him because I’m smarter than he is.”

  I watched him with a frown. For some reason, I couldn’t take that explanation as the be-all and end-all. I didn’t want to be one of those women who hid in the shadows of her man’s darkness.

  “You said your actions were methodical,” I said. “But they sure as hell couldn’t have been legal.”

  Jasper kept a straight face. “Was it legal when Arthur broke into your room and threatened you?”

  I shifted uncomfortably at the memory of Arthur’s goon grinding my ass. “No,” I said with a sigh.

  “Is it legal for him to extort me and force me to marry his daughter and my sister to marry his son?”

  I knew where he was going with this. I shook my head.

  “His lust for power was his weakness, Holly. I took advantage of that. It didn’t happen overnight. But I will say that I started destroying Valentine the moment my father was out of commission. Then you came into my life, and I had to struggle to remain patient while simultaneously speeding up the process.”

  I mused over the sped-up process. “Then if I hadn’t come into your life, would you have married Julia?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “But I never could have loved her. And instead of bankrupting her father, I would have acquired everything he had.”

  “I’m still curious to know what you did to him.”

  Finally, I got Jasper to look at me with a hint of a satisfied smile. After a moment, he sighed in a way that signaled surrender. “I re-re-distributed his wealth…”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Humph?”

  He chuckled as if amused by my response. “You’re sexy when you do that.”

  I waved my finger at him. “Uh-uh. Don’t seduce me now, Jasper Christmas.”

  We smiled at each other. It felt good to be solidly back where we’d been before Julia had showed up behaving like a crazy person.

  “Okay. Since you’re so beautiful and I’m in love with you, I’ll tell you this. Thomas was a sanctimonious and hypocritical purist. The original will contained a clause stating that a descendant would have to pay restitution to the others in the amount of sixty percent of the original treasure if they brought shame on the family. Conrad broke the no-contest moral clause with the war-hero stunt he pulled.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “But why are they making him pay for it now and not then?”

  Jasper pressed his lips together, and once again, I understood what that meant.

  “That’s all you’re willing to say?”

  He set his jaw. “Yes. That’s it.”

  At that point, I was sure I didn’t want to know more. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Jasper had fabricated the story about that moral clause. But then another thought came to mind.

  “You pushed one or more of the descendants to sue him, didn’t you?”

  He kept a straight face. There was no doubt he would make a world-class poker player.

  I shrugged, conceding. “Okay, then, we’re done talking about it.”

  “We still have to be careful, though. Arthur isn’t going down without a fight. And now Julia is completely on his side.”

  “I know,” I whispered.

  We stared at each other. The longer our gazes lingered, the more my heart rate increased. Jasper’s eye veered down to my exposed cleavage. He wanted to fuck. The next thing I knew, his mouth was on mine, and we were kissing so hard, so intensely, that our teeth kept clacking together. He stopped himself before ripping off my robe and spreading me on top of the bed.

  “I want you now,” he said with fervency, breathing heavily. “But we have to leave. Also there’s been a change of plans.”

  Even though my head was still spinning, I was able to ask, “What change of plans?”

  “I’ll tell you once we get out of here.”

  Chapter Ten

  The maid brought my garments, which included freshly washed panties and a bra. Even my coat had a laundered scent. She also gave me red cashmere earmuffs and a matching scarf, both courtesy of Jasper. We didn’t leave right away, though. I had to finish drying my hair, and he had to confirm our new flight plans. His security detail was racing up and down the hallways, knowing that Arthur Valentine wasn’t going to just lie down and take whatever punch Jasper threw at him.

  Jasper was right on time. As soon as I was done dressing, he walked into the bedroom and asked if I was ready. We couldn’t delay our departure one minute longer. On our way out, he revealed that Julia was being detained in one of the main elevators but would be released once we were in the sky and far away from the building.

  I could hardly believe what he was telling me. As far as I was concerned, the rabbit hole was just getting deeper.

  “You know that’s kidnapping, right?” I said.

  “No. It’s a mechanical difficulty.”

  I snorted as the cold air hit my face. Jasper took
hold of my hand, and we walked with our heads down toward the helicopter. There was a break in the weather. Even though enough snow had fallen to cover the whole outside floor of the expansive terrace, there wasn’t a sliver of ice on the concrete. It was clear that not only did he own the entire outside space, but the ground must have been heated as well, a convenience that surely cost a lot of money. Goodness, the man is richer than God.

  The sound of the blades racing was deafening. Jasper helped me into the aircraft, and I knew to put on the headset that was in my seat. This time, Jasper sat beside me. Once he had settled himself like I had, he took my hand again. His grip was tight, as if he was afraid I would somehow slip away from him. But he didn’t have to worry—despite his deep, dark secrets, I wasn’t going anywhere.

  The helicopter was strong and mighty, but every now and then, it would get rattled by the weather. When that happened, I would focus on the pilot, whose body held no tension. Also, Jasper would hold me tighter to ease my worry. I figured if the aircraft dropped from the sky, at least we would die together. I used that thought to ease my fear. The darkness was all around us and beneath us. About half an hour into the ride, I knew we weren’t on our way to Teterboro. I would have asked Jasper to enlighten me about our destination, but I was too exhausted to talk over the noise the aircraft made. So I yawned, and he held me closer and kissed the top of my head.

  “Babe,” Jasper faintly called. Then he said it louder.

  I opened my eyes wide. My head was still groggy, and I realized I had fallen asleep.

  Jasper unbuckled my seat belt. “Come on. Let’s get you inside and into bed,” he said loudly.

  My entire body felt heavy. Despite being able to smell the ocean and feel the sort of moisture that came from being near the sea, I could hardly keep my eyes open. It was as if the last four days had come crashing down on me.

  Jasper reminded me to keep my head down as we disembarked. His arms were around my waist as we walked off the helipad across a short space of lawn. I gazed up at the Christmas mansion sitting in the distance, then we got into the back seat of a black car with dark-tinted windows. That was the change in plans. Instead of taking an airplane, the helicopter had carried us the length to Newport, Rhode Island. If I’d had enough energy to ask Jasper to explain why we’d made that particular change, I would have. But as soon as the car started moving, I was asleep again.