Chapter Fifteen
Raff
I only let the guys come back to party a little because I knew I needed the distraction.
Did I want to charge up those steps and finish what Lula and I started on the dance floor?
Yes, yes, I did. But she was drunk. I was tipsy.
And when it did happen, I didn’t want there to be any kind of question about why it happened, nothing for her to point to and say, “That’s the only reason I let myself sleep with him. ”
Because this was Lula. A woman who hated to change her mind once she’d made it up.
And she’d made her mind up about me a long, long time ago.
It had taken this whole road trip to make her start to see how first impressions weren’t always right, that I had layers, that I might not be what she thought she wanted, but could be exactly what she needed.
So I had to let the night, and everything that happened, pass. In the bright, sober light of morning, I could reevaluate where we were, if she seemed ready for more.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, shaking my head at something Velle said in the pool as I made my way back toward the house, hearing my phone ringing.
It was probably my brother.
It was still a reasonable hour for a phone call in California.
But when I reached my phone on the island, it was Arty’s name on my screen.
“Finally,” I mumbled to myself as I slid my finger across the screen. “Arty, my man, where have you been?”
“I have some things to show you.”
“Now?” I asked, glancing up toward the stairs. Lula had disappeared hours ago, and I hadn’t heard so much as a creak of her bed frame since.
“Have plans tomorrow.”
Arty? Plans? Had hell frozen over?
“Okay,” I said, exhaling. “I’ll be there in… twenty.”
I’d stopped drinking a few hours back. I was good to drive.
York came through the back door with the pretty blonde he’d brought back from the club.
“Hey, I have to run to see Arty. If you see Lula, can you tell her I’ll be back?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You’re staying?” I asked, seeing Velle and his girl make their way around the side yard.
“Yeah. They’re taking the stretch back to her place. Then the stretch will come back here to bring Melissa home.” His arm tightened around the girl who was curled into him.
So I had a few hours.
“Alright. Good. I have my phone if you need me. I’ll be back.”
I got my phone and keys and made my way to the car. It almost felt wrong not to have her beside me in the front seat.
For a moment, I was worried that I might have to get used to her absence. That I’d fucked things up by kissing her at the club.
To be fair, I don’t think I instigated. It felt more like a mutual decision. Neither of us took the lead. We just made the move at the same time.
And, fuck.
I’d fantasized about kissing her more times than I’d care to admit. Yet none of those fantasies came anywhere near the reality. The heat, the tension, the slow crawl of desire that spread through me until it seemed to seep into my blood, into my bones.
And it was… enough.
As much as need tugged at me, I would have been happy to kiss her for hours, for days, and be perfectly satisfied. The way she swayed, softened, shivered.
A sigh escaped me as my cock started to harden while I threw the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway.
Focusing on it wasn’t helping.
I needed to try to keep my desire in check if I wanted a real shot at showing Lula that we could be something special.
It was why I’d acted like nothing happened after she came back from fleeing to the bathroom.
I wanted to give her time to process, to think, to roll the memory around in her mind over and over again.
Because I knew what I felt on that dance floor. I knew an interested woman when I had her in my arms. I just needed her to wrap her head around that on her own. Trying to convince a woman like Lula would only backfire on me.
I drove slowly down the still-busy streets of Miami, heading toward the shadier area that Arty called home.
It was a small building right beside a restaurant.
I’d only been inside once before, when I’d been working on something with the Golden Glades crew. But as I parked, I mentally prepared myself for the mess I would find inside: the overflowing trash, the flat surfaces covered in coffee cups, the laundry that was scattered and musty smelling.
So when I pushed open the door, I was shocked to find it relatively clean inside.
Did he finally learn how to keep house?
Or had his friends simply hired someone to handle things for him?
Arty was sitting at his desk, his multiple monitors casting his face in a blue glow.
“Do you ever lock your door? This isn’t the nicest neighborhood.”
“Knew you were coming,” Arty said, squinting at something as he scrolled so quickly that I got queasy when I tried to look.
“So, you found something?”
“I found a lot of things.”
“About Not-Drake.”
“Actually, his name is Drake. Conmen use the same first name a lot,” he explained, clicking around, bringing up nearly a dozen different pages, layering them on top of each other. “But his last name isn’t Holland, obviously. He’s been Drake Holland, Hammond, Burr, Calvin, Valentin, Murphy…”
“So, he’s a lifelong conman.”
“That he is. Hundreds of victims all over the world. Only one managed to get a picture of him, though. About five years back.”
He clicked to a screen and produced the image.
And, yeah, that checked.
The guy looked exactly like the kind of man Lula could have seen a future with. Tall, handsome, well-groomed, that confident air of a man who had done well in life.
Mix that with the on-paper qualifications that must have been impressive enough for her to believe he was someone safe and successful enough to put her trust in. To invest her savings in.
“So, I’m guessing he has no social media.”
“Never, from what I can tell. Though, there are a lot more holes in the internet than there used to be. That whole ‘the internet is forever’ thing isn’t as true as they try to make us believe.”
“How far back were you able to track him?”
“That’s what took so long. He has moved around… hundreds of times. All through his life. Back to elementary school.”
“Army brat?”
“Son of a conman,” Arty told me. He flipped the screen. “Meet Declan Martin.”
“Did he run real estate cons?”
“No. He liked the classics. He ran Casanova cons.”
“Sweetheart cons? He made rich women fall in love with him.”
“Then drained them dry and left them penniless. One after another after another. All across the United States. Even a few abroad.”
“And he dragged his son along with him.”
“A good way to disarm women who might otherwise be suspicious of strange, charming, handsome men.”
“Good point. So Drake watched his old man con women his whole life. No mom?”
“I couldn’t find anything out about his mom.”
“So did they just… start running cons together when he was older?”
“Meet Declan Martin, age forty-five.” Arty brought up a mugshot.
“One of his marks finally caught him, huh?”
“Yeah. Drake would have been roughly eighteen at this time. And he drops off the face of the earth for a few years. I can’t find anything about where he’d been.”
“He probably had access to his father’s money. Can’t imagine they put that shit in the bank. Probably took a tour of the world for a bit before he ran out and had to come back and continue his father’s work.”
“Except he didn’t choose sweetheart cons.”
“Maybe he had more hang-ups than his old man about banging rich older ladies.”
To that, Arty shrugged.
“So, how did he get started in these kinds of real estate cons?”
“He started small. It seems like the first real cons were rental fraud. Drake would advertise properties he didn’t own. Then he would require the mark to wire a security deposit and first month’s rent. Then he would disappear.”
“Asshole.”
“From there, there was seller impersonation fraud. He would assume the identity of a property owner—usually one where the actual owner was out of state—then hire a real estate agent, push for a fast, below-market cash sale, pocket the money, and take off before the real owner realized what went down.”
“Then he just kept working his way up to development scams.”
“Yeah, he spent a lot of years doing rental and seller impersonation cons. I’ve found at least two dozen victims there. Millions worth of money.”
“Did Daddy Declan proud, it seems. Why would he move to this if that was working?”
“There’s a lot of money in development. And a lot of ways to hide some of it disappearing. I don’t think he pulled a big con like he did on your friend much. This seems newer. I should have found more evidence of it if it was something he’d been doing for a while.”
“But?”
“But… this is where the most noise I am finding online is. The people who got scammed out of this kind of money.”
“The women?” I asked.
“Yeah. He seems to target women.”
“He can use his good looks to his advantage that way. Charm ‘em, get ‘em to start seeing a future with him. Distract them. Then rob ‘em blind.”
Anger, black and ugly, swirled inside me at the thought of Lula—already a woman who didn’t trust easily—realizing she’d gotten duped. She was so hard on herself about everything. I couldn’t imagine how badly she beat herself up about letting that happen.
Then having to reduce her whole life she’d busted her ass to get for herself.
It really was no wonder she was so hesitant to let herself trust her growing feelings toward me.
“Has anyone ever gotten close to nailing this guy?” At Arty’s silence, I pressed, “Arty?”
“That brings me to this.” Using the house, he clicked on a new window, bringing up a news article from two years before.
About a murder.
And a mystery surrounding the woman’s missing fortune.
My heart had tripped into overdrive as I leaned over Arty’s chair to read the details of the article, the comments from law enforcement, the bafflement of her living family members.
“Okay, how—” I started, only to get cut off by my phone. “One sec,” I said, moving away from his desk and toward the door, suddenly feeling like I needed a little fresh air.
Because if what Arty was suggesting was true, then Drake wasn’t just a conman; he was a killer.
Seeing York’s name on the screen, I swiped to answer as I made my way over to lean on my car at the street.
“Hey, York, is she asking—”
“Raff,” York barked, out of breath.
The whole world fell out from under me.
I straightened, my heartbeat in my throat, my stomach at my feet.
“What happened?” I asked, struggling to hear over the rush of my blood in my ears.
“She’s… she’s on her way to Amarantha.”
She was on her way to Ama?
As in… the doctor wife of one of the Golden Glades guys?
Had she fallen?
Gotten sick?
Drugged at the club somehow?
“She’s okay. But…”
“But what?” I snapped, rushing around the car toward the driver’s side.
“Someone got into the house, Raff. And they… they did some damage before I heard anything.”
Damage?
Lulu was damaged?
“Fuck!” I snapped, the rage and helplessness overwhelming me. My fist slammed into the hood of the car. Once, twice. Five times. The metal groaned and dented. Pain shot up my hand.
“She’s gonna need you,” York said when I was done beating up my car. “You need to get to the clinic.”
He rattled off the address.
And I was in the car, pedal to the floor, as my mind raced with a million different horrible ways Lula could be hurt.
By that bastard Drake.
He’d pay, I vowed to myself, one way or another, he would pay for putting his hands on her.
And it was going to be slow.
Bloody.
Painful.
But first, first I had to check on my girl.