LITMIR.BIZ

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the phone on the other end began to ring.

      Dylan silently upbraided himself for the mistake. That was careless. And he’d been so careful lately, too. It hadn’t happened to him in a number of years now. Most days, when he remembered not to rush himself, he could keep the dyslexia completely under control.

      No one at the firm suspected he had it. And except for this one girl—and he’d never confirmed it, saying she had to be mistaken—no one in either his college or the law school he’d subsequently attended, had ever even suspected that he had it.

      It was, overall, rather a mild form of the annoying condition. But it was always there, in the shadows, waiting to bedevil him when he least expected it, if he just let his guard down. And it always appeared when he had the least amount of time to deal with it.

      Until just now, it hadn’t cropped up for a very long time. He’d begun to think that maybe he was finally free of it. Finally free to feel unencumbered.

      Just went to show him he was going to have to remain ever-diligent and on his guard.

      He supposed that there were a lot worse things in life.

      Like a father courting public scandal.

      “Anyone?” he asked his father’s Chief Staff Assistant as she held the phone against her ear.

      Rather than answer him, Cindy held the receiver out for him to take. The ringing noise had ceased. A deep, masculine voice on the other end was saying, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”

      Dylan grabbed the receiver from her and placed it against his ear. It sounded like his father, but he couldn’t be sure.

      “Dad? Dad, is that you?”

      For a moment, there was silence on the other end. It stretched out so long that Dylan thought perhaps the connection had been lost. Or maybe the man on the other end had just laid the phone down and walked away. That, in his opinion, would have been par for the course, representing the sort of behavior he had come to expect from his father.

      And then, just as he was about to hang up the receiver, the same voice cautiously asked, “Who is this?”

      It made sense that his father didn’t immediately recognize his voice, Dylan decided. After all, it wasn’t as if they spent hours on the phone, talking. Or any time at all, really. When it came right down to it, other than a few calls home from his father over the years, he couldn’t remember ever talking to him on the phone.

      Phoning to catch up was just not his father’s way. These days, he seemed to like his family subdued and out of sight.

      Too bad you can’t follow your own required behavior, Dad.

      “This is Dylan Kelley,” he answered, then added, “your son,” for good measure.

      The information was met with more silence on the other end.

       Chapter 3

      Just as he was about to surrender his last shred of patience and say something really terse to his father, Dylan heard the voice on the other end of the line challenge, “How do I know that you are who you say you are? How do I know that it’s really you?”

      He didn’t remember his father being this paranoid. But then, his personal memories of his father were admittedly not only few and far in between, but vague as well.

      “Why?” Dylan asked. “You have another son named Dylan?”

      “No, but my son Dylan hasn’t spoken to me in months now. So many that I can’t really recall just how long,” his father replied.

      It annoyed Dylan that his father made his answer sound more like an accusation than a statement of a situation that he had brought upon himself. “And I wouldn’t be calling now if you hadn’t gotten yourself into one hell of a mess.”

      Hank was still wary. Still nervous. “My son wouldn’t care.”

      “I don’t,” Dylan answered coldly. “But all of this is ripping the hell out of Mother.”

      The last he’d heard, his mother had gone into hiding to avoid having to make any sort of a statement or subject herself to the public’s insatiable appetite for scandal.

      For a split second, Dylan debated continuing on this path. Inadvertently, his father was handing him his way out. He could just back away, saying something inane about just wanting to check on his father’s whereabouts and now that he had, he was done with it.

      But that wasn’t why he was here, Dylan reminded himself stoically. He was here not just to do damage control but, like it or not, to try to pull his father out of this quagmire.

      “I’m offering you my services so we can find a way out of this and spare Mother any further humiliation. After everything you’ve put her through, essentially leaving her to raise the four of us by herself, she doesn’t deserve this.” And if it hadn’t been for his uncle Donald, they would have found themselves to be all alone. The nannies and servants were exceedingly poor substitutes for a parent’s love, a parent’s attention. “The press is hell-bent on hounding her.”

      He heard his father laugh shortly. “I know the feeling.”

      Dylan knew he should keep his comment to himself, but he just couldn’t. There was a deep-seated anger he needed to vent before he could be of any use to the old man. “I doubt that you’re able to feel anything at all that doesn’t directly affect you.”

      There was a pause again. He was sincerely skeptical that guilt had backed his father into silence. When it came to what the family thought of him, Dylan was convinced that his father had the emotional hide of a rhino.

      When the senator spoke again, it was to ask another question. “How did you get this number?”

      Dylan glanced toward the woman who had given up all pretense of not paying attention to every word he was saying. She stood on the other side of the desk, unabashedly listening to his end of the conversation, most likely trying to fill in the blanks that she wasn’t able to hear.

      “Your Chief Staff Assistant gave it to me.”

      “Cindy Jensen gave it to you?’ his father asked incredulously. “She believed you?”

      Dylan sighed. He hadn’t come here to play games. His time was too precious for that. Hitting the speaker button, he retired the receiver into the cradle. “Here, why don’t you ask her yourself? I just put you on speakerphone.”

      “Where are you?” Hank wanted to know, far from won over.

      “I’m standing in your Beverly Hills office,” Dylan told him. And then he turned his attention to Cindy. “Ball’s in your court, Chief Staff Assistant,” he said, deliberately putting emphasize on the word chief.

      “Cindy?” Hank asked uncertainly.

      “I’m right here, Senator,” Cindy answered, moving closer to the phone on the desk.

      “Cindy.” There was relief in Hank’s voice, as if he could now relax because someone he trusted—one of the few individuals he trusted—was there on his behalf. “And you’re convinced that you’re dealing with my son? One of my sons?” Hank said, qualifying his question.

      “Yes, sir,” Cindy replied firmly. “He showed me his driver’s license.”

      “Driver’s licenses can be faked,” Hank pointed out, then instructed her to describe him.

      Cindy frowned. She hadn’t thought of that, that the man could be showing her a fake driver’s license. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the individual on the other side of the desk more closely. Something in her gut told her she was right, despite the momentary uncertainty.

      “He’s about six foot one,” she began.

      “Six foot two and a half,” Dylan corrected her. It wasn’t that the inch

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