Guarding Grace - Rebecca York

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wanted to run. But she forced herself not to panic. Two years ago she’d turned her life upside down and come to Washington on her own. If she could do that, she could get through this.

      At least she’d caught one lucky break. She’d gone shopping with a coworker on her lunch hour at a couple of the boutiques on Seventh Street. Fumbling in her briefcase, she pulled out a black jockey’s cap and jammed it onto her head, pushing her sable-colored locks out of sight.

      She thought about hiding her blue eyes with sunglasses. But that would look strange at night.

      Keeping her head down so the security cameras wouldn’t pick up her face, she stepped out of the copy-machine room.

      But she couldn’t stop the death scene from playing out in her mind. She’d known Ridgeway had heart problems. And hidden them from the public. He was arrogant. And secretive. And he’d thought he could operate outside the laws of God and man.

      She started to turn away. Then from under the sofa, she caught the glint of something that sparkled. As she stared at it, she remembered the split second when Karen had looked at her—then to her right. Toward the couch.

      Every self-protective instinct screamed at Grace to get out of the building before it was too late. But instead of running in the other direction, she took a quick step toward the couch, then another. Reaching underneath, she felt something that wasn’t part of the office equipment. It was Karen’s beaded evening bag.

      Had it gotten kicked there during the emergency? Or had Karen deliberately hidden it?

      Why? As proof of what had happened?

      Or maybe she’d understood Grace’s dilemma—and handed her a kind of insurance policy.

      With shaking fingers, she shoved the evening bag into her briefcase. Conscious that she had to get out before they locked down the consortium complex, she stood and walked into the hall, striding to the exit as if she’d only been working late.

      “See you next week?” the security guard asked, and she knew he wasn’t in the loop.

      “Yes,” she managed to say in a cheerful voice as she turned in her badge, signed out and walked toward the gate that opened onto Pennsylvania Avenue, praying it was still open.

      BRADY LOCKWOOD bent his muscular six-foot frame so that he could stare into the unpromising depths of the refrigerator, eyeing a red-and-white carton of kung pao chicken and half a Philly cheese steak.

      How old were they, exactly? Probably old enough to send his digestive system into spasms.

      He tossed the takeout containers into the trash, then grabbed a bottle of ginger beer and took a swig, wincing as the sharp bite of the potent soft drink hit his mouth.

      For the past three years he’d lived in Washington, DC, in La Fontana, one of the grand old apartment buildings that lined upper Connecticut Avenue.

      Better get back to work, he told himself, heading for the office down the hall. He’d taken a new case this afternoon. Typical P.I. deadbeat-dad stuff. Not like the interesting assignments he’d gotten from the Light Street Detective Agency.

      But that was then. This was now.

      He’d just started thumbing through the files, when the phone rang. Although the ID didn’t give the caller’s name, the number told him it was the Ridgeway residence.

      He braced to hear his brother asking for help with his latest mess.

      Instead, John’s wife expelled the breath she must have been holding. “Brady, thank God.”

      “Lydia, what’s wrong?” he asked, picturing her delicate aristocratic features stiff with tension but not a strand of her dyed auburn hair out of place.

      “I can’t talk over the phone,” she said, her control almost slipping. “Just come over here. I … need you.”

       I need you.

      In the twenty-five years they’d known each other, she had never uttered those words. In public she could look friendly. But she’d never asked for his help. What was going on over there?

      “I’m on my way.”

      Hurriedly, Brady changed from sweats into dark slacks and a button-down shirt. As an afterthought, he shrugged into a tweed jacket and paused to swipe a comb through his unruly dark hair.

      On the ride up rain-washed Connecticut Avenue, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He reached for his cell phone, then drew his hand back. He couldn’t call Lydia to ask what was wrong, not when she’d sounded so secretive. Was she going behind John’s back? What?

      As he wove in and out of traffic, his mind drifted to the strange workings of fate. And of genetics.

      Brady might be the smarter brother, but it was John who had the ear of the U.S. President.

      Brady’s goals had been more modest. He’d seen what the quest for power did to a man, how it changed his values and warped his perspective. All he’d wanted was a fulfilling job, a comfortable life—and a wife and two kids.

      His hands clenched on the wheel. Unfortunately, that had been too much to ask.

      As he turned into the driveway of the Ridgeway estate, the man in the guardhouse gave him a grim-faced look. Before Brady could blink, a bank of bright lights switched on, momentarily blinding him.

      “Get out of the car,” a voice boomed. “Keep your hands in the air where we can see them.”

      Shadows moved behind the lights. Men. With guns—judging by the glint of metal.

      “Out of the car,” the voice boomed again. “On the double if you don’t want to get your ass shot.”

      Brady stepped into the rain, blinking as the spotlights stabbed into his vision.

      From behind the wall of light, he heard a familiar voice, Bill Giordano, the man who headed his brother’s home security detail.

      “It’s okay, Taylor. He’s Ridgeway’s brother.”

      Brady was allowed to get back into the car, along with the security man, and they proceeded up a curving drive toward the fifty-room mansion his brother had bought ten years ago.

      “What are you doing here?” Giordano said, speaking in the quiet tone that Brady knew meant watch out how you answer.

      “Lydia called me. She said she needed me. What’s going on?”

      “There’s no easy way to say this. Your brother is dead.”

      Brady managed to drag in enough air to say, “How?”

      “Heart attack—we think,” Giordano answered. “He was catching up on some work at the office before he and Lydia went to a reception.”

      “Doesn’t the consortium have a doctor on staff?”

      “And defibrillators. All the goddamn latest equipment. If they could have saved him, you know damn well they would have.”

      Brady nodded, trying to pull himself together.

      Lydia was waiting for him in the upstairs family lounge. Her eyes were red-rimmed as she walked toward him, setting a glass on an end table as she crossed the room.

      As if to mock the occasion, she was dressed for an evening reception in a long emerald gown that was the perfect color for her hair and skin.

      When she embraced him, the scent of the liquor on her breath grabbed him as tightly as her arms, and a seductive thought wove itself into his mind. He could have a shot of bourbon. Just one. To get himself through the trauma of John’s death.

       Stop it.

      One

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