Back in Black by Rhys Ford

Author:Rhys Ford [Ford, Rhys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gay Romance
ISBN: 9781644058268
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2020-02-03T18:30:00+00:00

Twelve

“I WAS backpacking through Mongolia when I got the call about Mama,” the real Marlena said, staring at the now empty hospital bed in the room. “I was in the air when he was being attacked, I guess. It’s all a blur. I can’t even tell you what day it is. When I landed in LAX, I had messages from my boss in San Francisco, asking me if my grandfather was all right. Soon as I found out where he was, I headed straight over. The detective on the case left me your name on my voice mail but I already knew it. You’re the man who Poppa hired to catch Mama cheating on him.”

A battalion of scrub-wearing nurses and attendants had bundled the old man off for parts unknown a minute or so before, unwrapping him from his nest of tubing and transferring him to a gurney much like a pit crew servicing a racecar between laps. She’d sat down back into her chair, only the tightness around her mouth and the shadows beneath her eyes giving me any indication of how tired she was.

“You must’ve just gotten here, then.” I knew all too well what she was going through, and there weren’t any words I could say to make her feel any better. She’d been delivered a one-two punch, and I was going to have to scrape at her freshly inflicted wounds to see if she had any information about the blond bombshell posing as a Brinkerhoff. Going slow was probably my best bet, especially since she hadn’t called security yet to have me removed. “They said they were going to be a couple of hours. Do you want to head down to the cafeteria and get something to eat or a cup of coffee? You’re probably dead on your feet.”

She stopped staring at the bed, focusing on me for the first time since they wheeled Arthur Brinkerhoff out to be lubed and x-rayed by trained professionals. There was a hardness to her face I recognized from her grandmother’s expression on the night Adele chased me through a topiary garden with a shotgun. I could see the woman Arthur had probably fallen in love with mirrored in Marlena’s strong features. There was a quiet beauty to her, a strength and resolve I hadn’t seen in the fake Marlena. The other woman who’d tried to pass herself off as a Brinkerhoff had packaged herself as sexy and mysterious—something to tickle a man’s fantasies—but the woman sitting in the unforgiving, much-too-hard-on-the-ass hospital chair promised nothing but the truth. And possibly if you were man—or woman—enough to win her over, you would be set up for life with someone who would love you and fight to the death for you.

The fake Marlena definitely wouldn’t even consider getting a hangnail for someone else. I’d fallen in love with Jae when he wrapped himself in secrets and frothy familial lies, but I’d seen the man who ached to live out in the open—a

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