LITMIR.BIZ

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      Danger might be a factor. Nora shrugged the thought away. Danger didn’t scare her. Being poor did—and she wasn’t about to let that happen. She still had a few aces up her sleeve.

      * * *

      Gabriel Santiago stepped out of the elevator and immediately recognized the curvy figure walking a few paces in front of him. If it had been anyone else but Elana, he would’ve appreciated the round ass in a too-short faded denim skirt showing off a spectacular pair of legs. Since those legs belonged to his cousin, his quasi sister, his protective big-brother instincts bolted to the surface.

      Ripped denim skirt and thousand-dollar shoes. Only in Elana’s world...

      “Elana! Wait up!” Gabe ordered, and when she turned around, his eyes scanned her face. He could read her better than most; he saw the fear and uncertainty in her eyes and knew, from her quavering chin, that tears were very close to the surface. Her long deep brown hair, the exact color of excellent Colombian coffee, hadn’t seen a brush that morning, and he could see a fine rash on her cheek.

      Razor burn. His cousin had just tumbled out of someone’s bed, and that someone, he was damn sure, wasn’t Thom. Not my circus, not my monkeys, Gabe thought. He had bigger problems to deal with than Elana’s sex life. In fact, he’d far prefer to assume that Elana didn’t have a sex life at all...

      “Gabe!” Elana opened her arms, and Gabe pulled her slight frame against his chest, burying his nose in her hair. She was like a cold, wet puppy, he thought, a little alone and a lot scared. He gathered her hair into his fist and gave it a tug, like he used to do when she was a kid. As he expected, Elana tipped her head back to look at him.

      “It’ll be okay.”

      Elana stepped back and tried to pull a smile onto her face. “I normally believe you, Gabe, but today I have my doubts. How is he? What do you know?”

      “Nothing more than what is on the news.” If there was ever a time that Luc and Rafe could drop their he’s-just-our-cousin routine, it should be today, but nope, neither of them had bothered to call him. Ignoring the slow, acidic burn of hurt, Gabe led Elana toward the doors leading to the intensive care ward, Elana’s hand in his. He was part of this family but not, part relative, part cousin, part servant. That wasn’t fair, Gabe thought—Mariella had never treated him like anything other than a beloved nephew. Neither, in fact, had Harrison. It was their precious sons who resented his presence in their lives, both in the Marshall empire and at Casa de Catalina. Neither Luc nor Rafe wanted to work at the family business, but they resented the fact that he did, that he had both Harrison’s and Mariella’s ears. They hated the fact that their parents trusted him with their family finances and consulted with him on all major decisions concerning the massive company they’d created. Because, while Harrison was the face of his empire, Mariella in many ways was the glue that held it all in place.

      When he was small, Gabe had liked to pretend that Mariella and not Ana, Mariella’s younger sister, was his mother. Who could blame him for not wanting to claim Ana, a wild child, sexually promiscuous and drug-addicted party girl? He’d lived most of his life with Mariella and Harrison, twenty-three of his thirty-three years, and in all ways he considered them his parents. Ana was just his incubator. But when a prominent couple, California royalty, took on a child that was not their own, tongues wagged and turned vicious. He was called the “Marshall outsider,”

      “the other one” or “the poor relative.” Two degrees in business, working his ass off, and California society still thought that the Marshalls were practicing nepotism by employing him.

      Gabe rolled his shoulders, trying to dislodge the massive chip on his shoulder. Annoyed with himself, he slapped his broad hand on the door leading to the ICU and pushed Elana ahead of him. The waiting room, as he quickly noticed, was empty.

      “Where are they? Where are my mother and my brothers? Joe?” Her face suffused with color, and tears shimmered in her big round eyes. Elana lifted her fingers to her mouth. “Oh, God, is Daddy dead?”

      Acquire, assess, act. It was one of Harrison’s favorite quotes. Gabe tried to swallow, conscious of the lump in his throat. Harrison was the only father he had, and he couldn’t be dead. He wouldn’t allow that. “Take a breath, Elana, and let’s ask. Don’t make assumptions.”

      “My father is in ICU, my family is not here and you can’t tell me how to feel!”

      I’m your family, too, Gabe wanted to point out, and I’m trying to help, dammit. But, as he well knew, there was no reasoning with Elana when she was upset. He glanced at the nurses’ station and cursed when he saw that it was empty. Walking toward the second set of doors leading to the ward, he looked through the high windows set into the door and noticed that the nurses were hovering around a bed on the far side of the wall. Judging by the pretty toes he could see, the patient they were working on was not Harrison. He turned back to Elana and issued a terse instruction. “You call your brothers, and I’ll call Mariella. Maybe, between us, we can find out what the hell is going on.”

      Elana nodded and pulled her bag off her shoulder to look for her cell phone.

      “Elana?” Gabe waited until she met his eyes before speaking again. “I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise. I won’t let the family down.”

      * * *

      Elana held Gabe’s eyes and slowly nodded as her panic receded. When Gabe looked at her like that, with those deep, serious eyes, wearing his I’ve-got-this expression, she knew she could take his word to the bank. He would do exactly what he said. Jarrod was hot fire and Thom quiet, steady rain, but Gabe was the solid rock beneath her feet.

      Thom, hell. Elana looked down at her screen and saw his missed calls. She could imagine him running his hands over his face, a frown between his strong eyebrows. If she called Thom, he would pepper her with questions she didn’t have answers for, would question where she’d been and why she wasn’t picking up. Talking to him would be like pouring another layer of guilt onto the mountain she already carried around, and that load threatened to break her, mentally and physically. Jarrod was so much easier to talk to—his comme ci, comme ça attitude could be annoying, but he was uncomplicated. Jarrod was shallow, and right now, she needed shallow. It allowed her a place to escape, the freedom not to feel.

      Sometimes, she would do anything not to feel. All her life she’d run away from situations and conflicts, choosing to flee rather than feel, deal. She’d run to Thom when she couldn’t cope with whatever was happening at home—her parents fighting, Rafe and Luc sniping at each other and taunting Gabe. As an adult she turned to Gabe to solve her work conflicts, to Thom when she needed a comforting ear and endless support, and to Jarrod when she wanted to escape.

      She did a lot of running, a lot of avoiding, and Elana knew that it was a flaw she needed to address. The problem was that it was so much easier not to. Swimming at the shallow end of the pond, not putting in the effort, avoiding depths and currents, was a lot easier than wading into deeper waters. Besides, her father was dying, her family was falling apart and the renovation of Elana Marshall into a better version of herself could wait until this blew over. While she waited for more information, she could seek comfort. She could also choose to escape.

      Door number one or door number two?

      Elana glanced at Gabe and saw that he was involved in a tense conversation. She quickly moved away, her thumb hitting a much-dialed contact on her phone.

      “Hey, it’s me...”

      * * *

      Technology, the Fixer thought, was awesome, and God bless those brainy nerds who developed the ability to combine ones and zeros and somehow convert those numbers into a live video and audio feed. The Fixer didn’t know how it happened but was grateful that it did. It made life so much easier.

      Sitting in the expensive vehicle in the parking lot of El Acantilado, Harrison’s flagship restaurant, The Fixer stared down at the cell phone screen, eyes bouncing between the six tiny images on the phone. Touching the first screen, the picture zoomed in to reveal live footage of the helicopter

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